“Rocketman” Ryan Newman tames Texas

Ryan Newman didn’t look like the strongest car on Sunday for the Samsung/Radio Shack 500 at Texas Motor Speedway, but pit strategy, and a great handling race car helped the 2002 Winston Cup Rookie of the Year streak to his second win of his career. Bobby Labonte started on the pole on Sunday, but didn’t materialize as a factor, falling back quickly on the start of the race. Last years champion and teammate of Labonte’s, Tony Stewart, started twenty-second after his primary car was impounded by NASCAR in an unprecedented move, which had all the garage talking. Bill Elliott was the surprise in the early going. After a good qualifying effort, he quickly went around leader Elliot Sadler in the M&M Ford to take the lead. Elliott moved away from the rest of the field for forty laps but his engine would let go on lap forty-five, taking him to the pits and a last place finish for the Dodge owned by Ray Evernham. Elliott’s demise fell right into the hands of Sadler as he took the point and would lead the most laps of the day, looking like he would be the one to beat through the first part of the race. Sadler would also pick up the extra five bonus points for leading the most laps with ninety one, but coming out of turn two on lap 226 he just lost the car and slammed hard into the inside wall, ending what would have been a great day for the Robert Yates owned Taurus. Ryan Newman stayed in the top five for most of the day as did Jeff Gordon in the Dupont Chevrolet as well as Dale Earnhardt Junior in his Budweiser car, and after a total of ten caution flags for various wrecks, the three cars were out front. It looked like pit strategy would play a part again at Texas, but a late caution on lap 235 took that out of the equation, or at least everyone thought so. Newman came in first and wanted to insure he would stay that way, taking on only two tires, when the rest of the field took on four. Even the commentators were skeptical of the move and on the restart it looked like they were right when Earnhardt Junior went around the Alltel Dodge with about fifty laps to go. Gordon and Jerry Nadeau were the fastest cars on the track and came hard for both Newman and Earnhardt, but just couldn’t come up to challenge. Newman was content to ride in the second position until there were only ten laps to go when he took a daring move to the inside of Earnhardt and retook the lead. He was able to streak away from the second-place car and hold on for the win. The race was for second, and as the laps wound down Gordon got on the back bumper of Earnhardt and bumped him out of the way. Earnhardt wasn’t laying down for that, and passed Gordon back and on the last lap the two cars came out of four almost side by side. The two touched a couple of time, but Earnhardt held off the charging Gordon for second place by a slim margin of two hundredths of a second. Jerry Nadeau had a great day sporting The Army sponsorship and got his best finish of the year in fourth. Mark Martin, who was almost a lap down at one point, took fifth and point-leader Matt Kenseth increased his lead with a sixth place finish. Jeff Green was the best finishing driver for Richard Childress bringing the AOL Chevrolet car home in seventh with Jimmie Johnson right behind him. Kurt Busch kept his championship hopes alive continuing his string of top ten finishes and young rookie sensation Jamie McMurray brought his Dodge home in tenth. The Winston Cup Series goes to Talledega, Alabama next Sunday for another of the restrictor plate races.