Well, we’re just a few hours away from the start of Richmond.  Since qualifying was rained out on Friday, the starting order was determined by championship points.  Bill Elliot used the past champions provisional to get the Wood Brothers  entry in the field.  Tony Raines in the #34, Sterling Marlin in the #09 both missed the field.  Also missing the field was Joey Logano in the Home Depot #02.  This was to be his Sprint Cup debut. 

Those three are all listed as DNQs but it doesn’t seem quite right listing them that way since they were unable to turn a lap.  I would imagine that as a team member, this would be frustrating.   I mean, if you work your tail off, you’ve done the best that you can do and miss the field by qualifying, that would suck but at least you know that you did what you could to get in.  Setting the field by points would just be tough on morale.  Again, you’ve done everything that you could.  You think you’ve hit all your marks but no one will ever know because you didn’t even get to run a lap.

At some time in the near future (probably over the off season), I’ll probably do a rant on the whole qualifying system and how it could be improved but we’ve got much better things to talk about this week.  Here’s how the starting grid lines up this week.

Courtesy: Rockingham Raceway Park

ROCKINGHAM, N.C. (May 3. 2008) – Joey Logano, who paced Friday’s  ARCA RE/MAX Series practice at Rockingham Speedway, edged Ricky Stenhouse Jr. by a mere 0.080 second Saturday to earn the pole position for this weekend’s Carolina 500.
 
Logano, who will make his NASCAR Nationwide Series debut for Joe Gibbs Racing in June, posted a lap of 146.645 mph, 24.549 seconds, in a Chevrolet. Stenhouse, driving a Roush Fenway Racing Ford, turned a lap on the 1-mile track of 146.169 mph, 24.629 seconds.
 
“I feel pretty confident for tomorrow,” Logano said. “I think we got a really good car for the long run. We were able to move around a lot in practice yesterday and try different things. Traffic is gonna be a bear out there, so it’s gonna be staying out of trouble most of the night.”
 
Stenhouse said he didn’t expect for be second quickest.
 
“To come out here and pick up a second, I was pretty surprised,” Stenhouse admitted. “I figured we’d be top five or 10. I didn’t really know we’d be on the front row. The guys changed a little bit on the car from out last qualifying run yesterday [Saturday]. I just got into the gas and it stuck.”
 
Rounding out the top 10, respectively, were: Justin Lofton, Dodge; Michael Annett and Jack Bailey in Toyotas; Matt Carter, Ford; Justin Marks, Toyota; Justin Allgaier, Chevrolet; Ken Butler, Toyota; and Austin Dillon, Chevrolet.
Dillon, the grandson of NASCAR championship car owner Richard Childress, said the 312-lap event was “grassroots racing again.”
 
“I watched the last race here (in February 2004),” Dillon said. “This is really cool to go back I history and watch these guys, and now we get to come here and race 50 cars on the track. That’s just really cool.”