Short day for field fillers in Food City 500

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- Based on the incident that sidelined Jeff Gordon last weekend at Darlington, you knew NASCAR would be flying the black flag early and often for cars struggling to find speed at Bristol Motor Speedway.

	Joe Ruttman

The tight .533-mile Bristol oval was expected to be a major test of NASCAR's ability to keep slower cars from creating moving roadblocks. NASCAR set a minimum speed of 17.16 seconds in Sunday's drivers meeting.

Quickly losing ground to the leaders, the No. 09 Dodge of Joe Ruttman and No. 80 Ford of Andy Hillenburg were parked five laps into the Food City 500. Kirk Shelmerdine's No. 72 Ford made eight laps before retiring.

Crews had Ruttman's and Shelmerdine's mounts loaded into their haulers before the race was 40 laps old.

Just looking in the pit boxes before the race, it was apparent that several teams knew they wouldn't be long for Sunday's event.

While most of the regulars had at least a dozen sets of new Goodyears at the ready, Ruttman's pit had exactly one spare set of scuffed tires.

Stan Barrett's No. 94 Chevrolet had two sets of stickers in his pit box, while Geoffrey Bodine's No. 98 Ford had eight extra tires, two of which were new.

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Shelmerdine and Hillenburg both had at least six sets of tires available at the start.

Hillenburg was running above NASCAR's minimum speed rule during last weekend's Carolina Dodge Dealers 400 when he was tapped by Tony Stewart and slammed into by Jeff Gordon.

"I don't know what happened with Andy getting spun, but I'll tell you what, there's a bunch of cars out there that don't belong," Gordon said. "They're way off the pace and in the way."

"As long as they're allowed to go out there and run those speeds, then by all means they should. It's not against them. There are cars out there that aren't up to the speed they need to be (in order) to be in this series."