Gordon

Staying out of someone else's trouble is half the battle in a Winston Cup race and it was a battle the No. 31 Cingular Wireless team lost late in Sunday's UAW-GM Quality 500 at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Charlotte is not one of the first race tracks you think of when talking about getting involved in someone else's wreck. But Martinsville, our next stop on the Winston Cup circuit, definitely is.

The weather certainly wasn't in our favor last weekend at Charlotte. Qualifying was rained out Thursday evening and NASCAR was forced to set the starting field based on owner points. It was the same story Sunday. Heavy rain postponed the start of the race by about 3½ hours. We finally took the green flag about 4 p.m., preparing for a race under the lights on a green race track. We knew the track would be much different than it had been during Saturday's Happy Hour practice session.

I tried to be very patient with the Cingular Wireless Chevrolet in the opening laps because it was tight. Unfortunately for us, the first 137 laps went green and allowed the leader to put us and others one lap down because we couldn't run the car as hard as we wanted due to the ill-handling condition. We fought our way back into the 27th position by lap 219 and the caution flag waved the following lap. We pitted for four tires and chassis adjustments and great work by my pit crew gave me a couple of positions on the track. The Cingular car was finally the best it had been all night and we were pumped up about moving through the field and picking up some spots.

But all that hard work soon went up in a puff of smoke and debris. On lap 230, the No. 26 car drove underneath two other cars and into the tri-oval grass, triggering a 10-car pileup that involved the No. 31 car and my two other Richard Childress Racing teammates. I saw cars crashing in front of me in a big cloud of smoke and tried to slow down to miss the pileup but somebody clipped me in the rear and turned me around backwards. It's really disappointing because we were trying to get a decent finish and keep moving up in the points. But someone else's mistake cost us that opportunity.

I pulled the car into the garage and the crew went to work on repairing the mess but soon realized the car was too severely damaged to safely return to the race track. We were credited with the 38th position.

When I got caught up in that wreck, I re-aggravated a previous injury to my left ankle but the doctors checked me out in the infield care center and determined that I didn't sustain any further damage. It was just a little sore but I'm fine now.

	Robby Gordon is close to completing his first full season with Richard Childress Racing.

Now we are gearing up for Martinsville, a track where the odds of getting caught up in someone else's mistake are much higher than at Charlotte. You can pretty much bet your bank account that 500 laps at Martinsville won't go caution-free. The interesting thing this weekend is going to be the tire situation. Tires will matter this time at Martinsville and we're going to be pitting for tires a lot more often that we used to.

My teammate Jeff Green tested at Martinsville a couple of weeks ago and he and his crew chief Todd Berrier said the surface at Martinsville is a lot different than it was in April. Martinsville is an old track and the longer it is around, the rougher the asphalt gets. But everyone seems to agree that something was done to the race track to make it much rougher and grooved. I heard them say the track looks like a giant cat dragged its claws up the middle of the track and just gouged scratch marks in it.

It used to be that you could go about 200 laps or so on a set of tires but Green and Berrier said that maybe we can only make it no more than 70 or 80 laps before the tires look like they've been dragged across a cheese grater. They're expecting Martinsville to eat tires sort of like Darlington and Rockingham do. A lot of changes will be needed to the setups of these cars to prepare for the different track conditions at Martinsville, but hopefully Green's test will give us a baseline to start from this weekend.

It may be kind of like the track was in July at Loudon, N.H. Although the track surface was the same for everyone, some of the drivers had more difficulty with it than others. It definitely wasn't easy for me to control the Cingular car at Loudon, but we did a pretty good job and came out of there with a top-10 finish.

I think some of that has to do with my days of running off-road cars. You learn a lot of car control in the off-road series and I hope that that experience will help me this weekend at Martinsville. When you're running off-road, you twist the car in all sorts of directions and still manage to point it in the correct direction and in one piece when it matters. But when we roll into Martinsville, we all have the same conditions to work under and everyone must adapt to those conditions. I just hope that the Cingular team is competitive out of the box and we adapt a little better than the next guy.

I compare the turns at Martinsville to the hairpin turn on the road course at Sonoma, except you're turning right at Sonoma. Martinsville is like two hairpin turns in a row that make up an oval. Martinsville's got the sharpest and flattest corners on the circuit. When you're running Martinsville, it seems like it's smaller than Bristol, although it isn't, because the track is so flat and before you know it, you're back at the same, sharp corner again.

But I think the flat tracks are very good for me and they're a lot like road racing. We've run fairly decent the last couple of times at Martinsville but haven't come out with really good finishes. We were the quickest car in Happy Hour there last October and hopefully we can have the car just as competitive but be there at the end.

We tested at Atlanta Motor Speedway Monday in preparation for the Winston Cup race there at the end of this month. We were supposed to be there Tuesday, as well, but once again, we got rained out. We took two cars to Atlanta and I really liked one of them a lot. We have really struggled with our mile-and-a-half program lately for some reason. The first time I ever went to Atlanta, I sat on the pole, and ever since they reconfigured the track, I've had trouble. Hopefully we learned something at the test that we can put to use next weekend at Atlanta.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. We've got to go out and win at Martinsville first this weekend.

Robby Gordon drives the No. 31 Cingular Wireless Chevrolet for Richard Childress Racing. He is providing a diary to ESPN.com throughout the Winston Cup season.