Scott Riggs has moved up to 14th place in the Nextel Cup standings and now has his first pole. Credit: Autostock

Riggs bests Newman for first career Bud Pole

MARTINSVILLE, Va. (AP) -- Scott Riggs watched 30 cars run their laps at Martinsville Speedway on Friday, got a talking to from his father and then won the first pole of his career in NASCAR's premier series.

Riggs toured the shortest, slowest track in Nextel Cup racing at 96.671 mph, relegating Martinsville master Ryan Newman to the outside of the front row. Newman, the track record-holder, qualified at 96.657.

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"All my dad kept preaching to me before qualifying was just be smooth, be smooth, don't slip the car," Riggs said. "Don't be too aggressive, be smooth with it and you'll be good. You know, we ended up sitting on the pole with probably the ugliest lap I've ever had out there."

At each end on the first lap, Riggs said, he went too hard into the corners, had to collect the car and sailed off into the straightaways.

"I said, 'There's one lap gone,"' he said.

Instead, that was the lap that won him the pole in his 41st start in the Nextel Cup Series, making him only the 12th driver to earn the top starting spot in NASCAR's top three circuits. He has won five poles in the Craftsman Truck Series and two in the Busch Series.

Newman, who has 29 poles in 122 starts and started in the top 10 in all six previous visits to Martinsville, had the fastest car in practice, but cloud cover and a 30-minute delay for drizzle slowed the track down.

"You can't get the pole every time," he said. "We got beat by three-thousandths of a second, but I've won 'em that close before, too."

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Riggs' Chevrolet is the only non-Dodge in the first two rows. The second row has Jeremy Mayfield (96.583) and defending race champion Rusty Wallace (96.558), who leads active drivers with seven victories here.

It will be Wallace's 33rd top-10 start in 43 races at the track.

The third row has the Chevys of Kevin Harvick and Bobby Labonte, with Labonte's teammate Tony Stewart in the fourth row inside the Ford of Greg Biffle. Kurt Busch's Ford and Joe Nemechek's Chevy are in the fifth row.

Other notables on the starting grid are Jimmie Johnson, who won here last fall and will start 37th, and his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon, a five-time winner at Martinsville, who will go off 16th.

"In the fall race last year, we didn't run really well in qualifying but it was so much better in the race," Johnson said. "But we usually come from the back here, so we'll just have to do that again."

Virginia native Ricky Rudd, who arrived here 37th in points and needing to make the field on his own merit under NASCAR's new provisional system, turned a lap at 95.864 mph and will start 13th on Sunday.

"I felt the pressure today," Rudd, a three-time Martinsville winner, said. "I tried not to let it bother me, but it was still there. It was probably a little bit faster race car than I was able to show. I didn't want to make some stupid mistake and spin out, which is easy to do here."