 | | Jeremy Mayfield, left, and crew chief Slugger Labbe made the right call. Credit: Autostock |
By Ryan Smithson, NASCAR.COM
August 22, 2005
03:33 PM EDT (19:33 GMT)
BROOKLYN, Mich. -- Crew chief Slugger Labbe made an incredibly brave move to stay out in the closing laps at Michigan. If Jeremy Mayfield had run out of gas, he easily would have finished 25th or worse and would have been under considerable Chase pressure going into Bristol. As it was, Mayfield ended up going 104 miles on a tank of fuel, giving Dodge its first victory of the year on a track larger than one mile in length.  |  | | Jeremy Mayfield celebrates his first victory of the season. Credit: Autostock |
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This was the second time this year Mayfield has successfully gambled on gas. He stretched his fuel at Sonoma and finished seventh. Mayfield said he was sure he was going to run out of gas at Sonoma, but when the team checked his car after the race, he still had two gallons left, and that experience played into the team's decision Sunday. The teams of Scott Riggs and Joe Nemechek should be lauded also for going the last 52 laps on a tank of gas, but they had less to lose than Mayfield. Nemechek's gamble was a no-brainer. His chances for victory were gone after he had a tire go down earlier in the race, and crew chief Ryan Pemberton wasn't about to turn down a second chance to get the win. "I definitely have mixed feelings about [the race]," said Nemechek. "We took a gamble on fuel mileage and that paid off -- we finally got a break. I ran out of fuel just before the checkered flag." Fuel only works for Edwards Carl Edwards finished fourth by waiting until eight laps to go to make his stop. Crew chief Bob Osborne took tires out of the equation by waiting that long to stop, while teams that pitted earlier elected to take on tires. Kurt Busch pitted on Lap 182 and took four tires, and he finished seventh. "I thought, 'OK, we're going to have to stop and some guys aren't,'" Edwards said. "So I said, 'I'm just going to drive my heart out and try to get as much space as I can in case there's no caution.' "Then there was no caution. We came and pitted. I feel like our team did the best they could possibly do." Rudd goes the distance Ricky Rudd's car was damaged in the Elliott Sadler accident on Lap 82, and his team orchestrated four separate pit stops between Laps 142 and 148 to repair the damage and pack the car full of gas. Rudd was 32nd when the green flew on Lap 150, and he got as high as 16th before slowing down on the final lap to make sure he could make it to the end. He wound up 19th to remain 25th in the points. Quotable "The guys that did two tires or fuel only really cycled out through. They still didn't win, but that strategy was probably a little better." -- Jimmie Johnson, who lost a lot of track position by taking four tires late at Michigan | 
