2000 NAPA Autocare 500 at Martinsville

Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia, was the shortest track on the 2000 schedule at 0.526 miles, and a 500-lap race there is a short-track race in the fullest sense: 263 miles run at an average of 73.859 mph, which by the arithmetic puts the field in tight quarters for about three and a half hours. A short track, for the newcomer, is any oval under a mile, and racing on one is settled by brakes, patience and track position far more than by horsepower. Jeff Burton's No. 99 Ford led the most laps, 202 of them, and for a long stretch of the afternoon looked like the car everyone else had to catch. Stewart led 179. The decisive moment came late. With 11 laps left the field lined up for one more restart, Stewart took the green in front, and he kept the No. 20 there to the checkered flag while Earnhardt's No. 3 Chevrolet came home second and Burton settled for third. Ricky Rudd, Jeff Gordon and Dale Jarrett followed in fourth through sixth. Wikipedia's race article calls it Stewart's eighth Winston Cup win and his fifth of the 2000 season, and lists the winner's purse at $125,875. What the article does not give is a caution count or a tally of lead changes, so this page does not offer one. If you want that texture, a contemporary box score is the place to look, and the original Racin.net was one of the sites that carried that kind of sheet while the season was running.

The top ten below is taken from the Wikipedia race article, with laps led noted where the article gives them. Positions eleven through twenty went to Steve Park, Jerry Nadeau, John Andretti, Joe Nemechek, Bill Elliott, Ken Schrader, Terry Labonte, Mark Martin, Johnny Benson Jr. and Ricky Craven, in that order.

Burton led 202 laps. Stewart led 179, and the last 11 were the ones that paid.

Qualifying ran in two rounds, the format of the period: a first session in which the quickest cars locked in their starting spots, and a second round for everyone else to fill out the field. Stewart's lap of 19.855 seconds, an average of 95.371 mph, stood as the pole. Five drivers missed the race: Scott Pruett, Steve Grissom, Carl Long, Dave Marcis and Rich Bickle. The archive page that Wikipedia cites for this race was a practice speed sheet rather than a qualifying sheet, and its address tells you most of what there is to know about it.

• /nascar/cup/races/00/martinsville/2/prac3.shtml was the third practice chart of the weekend as Racin.net numbered its sessions
• The '2' in the path marks the second Martinsville race of 2000; the spring race lived in a sibling folder
• This rebuild keeps the address so the citation resolves, but does not reprint speeds it cannot check against a second source

The original Racin.net published practice and qualifying results as plain tables, one page per session. None of that original text or data is reused here; the results table above comes from Wikipedia, and where Wikipedia is silent, so is this page.

This was round 28 of 34. The closing stretch of the year went Charlotte on October 8, won by Bobby Labonte, then Talladega on October 15, won by Dale Earnhardt, then Rockingham, Phoenix, Homestead and Atlanta. Stewart added a sixth win of the year at Homestead on November 12. Labonte took the championship, and Matt Kenseth was rookie of the year. For a reader coming to the 2000 season through this archive, Martinsville is a fair place to start. It shows Stewart and Burton, two of the year's most frequent winners, settling a race on the kind of track where the cars are slowest and the margins are smallest, and it shows Earnhardt still able to run second on a half-mile in the No. 3. The practice sheet the old site kept for it is a small thing, a column of car numbers and lap times from a Saturday in October, but it is the reason this race has a page here at all.