Mastering Turn 3 is a key to winning at Pocono Raceway. Credit: Autostock

Fantasy Preview: Pocono 500

Pocono was built as a compromise of sorts, combining aspects of three popular Champ Car courses of its day, with three corners instead of two and each of them being distinct in banking and radius. Each straightaway is a different length, which makes racing at Pocono the ultimate compromise.

Drivers struggle all weekend to get their car to handle perfectly in one of the three corners, without giving up much in the other two corners.

	Jimmie Johnson has won the past two Cup races at Pocono. Credit: Autostock
	Inside the Numbers Hendrick Motorsports at Pocono Category Stat Starts 122 Wins 10 Top-5s 36 Top-10s 61 Poles 10 Laps Led 2,202 Avg. Start 12.0 Avg. Finish 14.1

The distinct corners make Pocono act as much like a road course as an oval, and a maxim in sports car racing states that one wants to work best in the corner that leads to the checkered flag. For that reason, the drivers want to handle off Turn 3, which will propel them down the longest straightaway in the series.

A good jump off the flattest corner of the three will not only get the car to the finish line first, that momentum carries them all the way into the Turn 1. Described as one of the scariest turns in the sport, it is the one with the greatest degree of banking, which is fortunate since it comes at the end of what is basically a drag strip.

If a driver can maintain his momentum into this corner and keep a driver from diving to the inside, he wins not only the drag to the finish line, but the entire lap.

Ken Schrader and Dale Jarrett both experienced fiery crashes in this corner in the past couple of years, and it is one of the few corners to injure the legendary Dale Earnhardt. Drivers are great about putting the danger out of their minds, but a niggling doubt has to fit around their subconscious as to whether the car will really stick this time.

The favorites

If you have $170 and change, you could fill up your roster with the Hendrick Motorsports teams, add a dark horse from the bargain basement to round if off, and call it a day. This is a track where the organization has always done well, with 10 victories to its credit spread over four different drivers: the late Tim Richmond won three consecutive races in the 1980s, Jeff Gordon has three to his credit, Jimmie Johnson swept there last year, and Terry Labonte won here in 1995.

When Labonte took the lead in that race, he inherited it from Gordon, who had the dominant car before he spun his tires on a late race restart and fell to the back of the pack.

Last year, the four active Hendrick Motorsports drivers finished with an average result of 6.5 in both races, and put every one of their four drivers in the top 15 in eight combined starts. Brian Vickers swept the top 15 with a 13th and 14th-place finish, Terry Labonte swept the top 10 with a sixth and seventh, and Jeff Gordon swept the top five with a fourth and fifth. Along with Johnson's pair of victories, this organization was both consistent and good, varying their spring and fall races by only one spot, which means they have the best notes of any team in the garage.

Those stats hold up over the course of time: In the past five races, the four current Hendrick drivers have failed to finish in the top 15 only once when Gordon crashed out of the fall Pocono race in 2003.

Labonte handpicked the races he would run during his two-year part-time retirement tour and it is no surprise that Pocono was in the mix. He enters the weekend with a five-race streak of top-10s, including a best of fifth in the fall 2003 race.

Kyle Busch is the only Hendrick driver without a history of success at the track (since this will be his first attempt at Pocono), but he comes into the weekend with two top-fives in the past three races; if not for a strained engine at Lowe's, that would easily have been three top finishes.

Man for man, Hendrick Motorsports dominates the Fantasy Power Rankings at Pocono (which is the average finish over the past three years plus the number of laps spent at the head of the field), capturing the top-three spots with Johnson, Gordon, and Vickers, as well as placing Labonte well within the top 10.

If you were tiring of Roush Racing and Hendrick Motorsports dominating Victory Lane, you are going to have to wait at least one more week for variety.

Dark horses

Last week, Jeremy Mayfield was listed as a dark horse at Dover because of his strong runs at that track over the past three races. He was just as strong at Pocono last season, finishing in the runner-up spot to Johnson in the spring race and backing it up the following month with a ninth-place finish.

	Credit: Autostock
	Inside the Numbers Jeremy Mayfield at Pocono Category Stat Starts 21 Wins 2 Top-5s 4 Top-10s 9 Poles 0 Laps Led 187 Avg. Start 20.6 Avg. Finish 17.2

Pocono was the site of Mayfield's first win in 1998, when he took the lead in the final corner of the final lap by "rattling the cage" of the ultimate tough man Dale Earnhardt. He followed that with another victory in 2000, which makes Pocono the site of half his four career victories.

Mayfield has been consistently strong in 2005 even if he does not very many top-fives to show for his effort.

Along with teammate Kasey Kahne, Evernham Motorsports averaged a nearly identical finish at Pocono to Hendrick Motorsports. Kahne finished 14th in the spring and third in the fall, which means that in four starts last season, Evernham averaged a finish of seventh without falling out of the top 15.

Robby Gordon stayed out on old tires at Dover to lead a few laps and get some television exposure for his team. He led seven green-flag laps before succumbing to the fresher rubber of Elliott Sadler, but the goal was accomplished. Now he needs a good finish to go along with a good run.

Pocono is the ideal oval for Gordon to come and accomplish that feat. Last year, in his final season with Richard Childress Racing he recorded only six top-10s, but two of them came here at Pocono. One reason for his good fortune is Pocono's road-course characteristics.

Avoidance principle

Jamie McMurray has run better at Pocono than his average finish of 25th would suggest, but it is the final result that pays the points. In four previous races, McMurray has completed the distance only once -- last fall he came home ninth. Other than that race, the closest he has come to running all the laps was in his first attempt when he was two circuits off the pace, finishing 32nd.

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Worse still, his poor finishes cannot be blamed on mechanical gremlins or bad luck. He has only one DNF for a blown engine last fall.

With a pair of 20-something finishes in his past two outings (as well as four of his last eight races), McMurray is best left in the garage for another week until the series rolls into the Irish Hills of Michigan for the fast two-miler and the following week when he will be a dark-horse contender at Infineon Raceway.

With Bobby Labonte finishing second at Lowe's two weeks ago, the bad luck mantle has been passed to Dave Blaney. His wicked crash at Dover was the latest in a string of four consecutive finishes outside the top 25 and one of nine consecutive finishes of 19th or worse.

At Pocono, he has not fared much better. Last year, he finished 27th and 29th in his two outings and he has finished outside the top 20 in four of the last five races here.

Blaney's fans will want to focus on the ninth-place finish he earned in fall of 2003 or the 10th he received in spring 2002, but the weight of his poor finishes supersedes those results by a wide margin.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.