just fine with his race team, and he
hopes that winning the pole for Saturday night's Pontiac
400 will help keep it that way."My team has had to endure a lot of disappointment and a lot of heartbreak this year," Mark said Friday after turning a fast lap at 124.613 mph at Richmond International Raceway. "Through all of that, they haven't got their chin down, they've never given up, we haven't had any cross words between us and they've just kept on working."
Things worked well for Mark's No. 6 Ford as he won his second straight short-track pole of the 2001 season. He also started first at Bristol on March 25, but in a finish that has been typical of his misfortunes this year he finished 34th there. Mark has had three top-10 finishes in the season's first 10 races, but he also has crashed out of three races and blown an engine in another. He has five finishes of 33rd or worse and is 23rd in the points standings coming into this race.
"It just felt like the old days to me," Mark said of his day at the track on Friday. In a brand new Taurus that his team had never tested, he was among the fastest cars in practice and then took the top starting spot in qualifying.
"I used to go to the track and drive cars that felt like this all the time," said Mark, who has now won 41 poles and 32 races - but who hasn't won a race in 36 starts. "We haven't had that some of the time this year. …This sport is humbling and I know how lucky I am to be driving for this team. …This was a shot my team really needed.
Mark's lap of the .75-mile track took 21.667 seconds - just three-thousandths faster than Rusty Wallace's Ford went much later in the qualifying order. Wallace ran 124.596 mph to get the outside spot on the front row.
"We just got beat today," Wallace said. "I was way too tight the first lap, I drove it in too hard, got it pushing way up and had to recover on the second lap."
Ricky Rudd, another Ford driver, was third fastest at 124.493 mph. It was the native Virginian's best qualifying effort at Richmond since he started second in 1992.
"It has been a long time since we qualified that well at Richmond," said Rudd, who hasn't won in his past 84 starts. "It would have been nice to have … had something for Mark, but it wasn't meant to be."
Steve Park, a winner earlier this year at Rockingham, will start alongside Rudd on Row 2 in his Chevrolet. Jimmy Spencer starts fifth with Jeff Gordon, who won the fall race at Richmond last season, sixth.
Tony Stewart, who got his first career win here in the fall of the 1999 season and who might have won here last spring had it not been for a pit-road bump-up with Dale Earnhardt Jr. late in the race, will start seventh. Earnhardt Jr., who went on to win here last May, starts 14th.
Bill Elliott and Ward Burton put their Dodges into the top 10 for the race, with Elliott eighth and Burton 10th - reigning Winston Cup champion Bobby Labonte is between them.
