Despite spending the day as a pinball in a pinball machine, Dale Jarrett walked away from Martinsville Speedway with a 16th-place finish in the Subway 500. While the UPS Ford Fusion performed better than the finish indicated, the UPS Team overcame issues on pit road, problems with the steering column and being a lap down to finish the race on the lead lap.
The UPS Team started the day nearly a lap down, as Jarrett qualified 39th at the half-mile Martinsville Speedway, where it's easy to lose a lap early in a race. Jarrett set a patient but steady pace early, moving to 29th within the first 60 laps. He proclaimed the UPS Ford to be handling well and the team only made minimal adjustments during the first half of the event.
A decent-handling car allowed Jarrett to move into the top-20 by lap 200 but found trouble just 31 laps later when an incident in the middle of the pack crammed the middle-to-end of the field together. Jarrett's car, along with others, suffered minimal damage, but the UPS Team lost a lap while making cosmetic repairs to the #88 UPS Ford.
More trouble surfaced 100 laps later when Jarrett was the innocent bystander that got caught up in an incident between Ken Schrader and development driver David Ragan. The team figured out that the tow on the car had been knocked in during the incident, shifting the steering column to a point that makes it difficult to handle the car. It took several pit stops to correct the problem, but the team completed the effort after getting the "lucky dog" on lap 361 and was placed back on the lead lap.
Jarrett spent the final 130 laps battling on the lead lap and running as high as fifth before setting with the 16th-place finish.
"We fought our way out of a lot of problems today to get this finish," Jarrett said. "We put ourselves in a hole there getting a lap down on pit road and we were pretty fortunate to get back on the lead lap, especially after damaging the tow like we did. It's really tough to make any kind of repairs at this track without losing a lap but we made some pretty significant changes there and we're able to leave here with a decent finish."
Teammate David Gilliland started the Subway 500 in 29th position and found himself down one lap early in the event. The driver of the #38 M&M's® Ford raced a clean event until misfortune found him on lap 270 when a cut right-front tire forced him to make a pit stop during green-flag racing conditions. Gilliland lost a few more laps during that incident and wound up finishing the day in 28th place.
Jimmie Johnson reinstated his efforts to secure the 2006 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series championship by winning the Subway 500. Johnson led the most laps in route to the lead and moves to third-place in the point standings, only 41 points out of first. Point leader Jeff Burton had an engine failure and dropped to fifth place in the point standings, 48 points behind Matt Kenseth, who now leads the series after finishing 11th in Sunday's race.
Jarrett remains 24th in the point standings while his teammate Gilliland maintained his position of 43rd in the standings.
The Atlanta Motor Speedway hosts the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series next weekend, which is the end of daylight savings time. The green flag is scheduled to wave for the Bass Pro Shops 500 at 2:55 p.m. EST on Sunday. NBC is carrying the live broadcast of the event, beginning with their pre-race show that starts at 2:30 p.m. EST.
