Pit Move: Richmond

As a Nextel Cup rookie, it's tough enough to keep your composure under normal circumstances. However, a "routine" pit stop with about 150 laps remaining turned out to be anything but routine for David Ragan on Sunday at Richmond International Raceway.

Running 15th when the caution came out for an incident involving J.J. Yeley, Ragan ducked onto pit road behind the rest of the lead-lap cars. However, as he began to turn into his stall, race leader Kevin Harvick suddenly exited his -- and drilled the No. 6 Ford just behind the driver's side door.

"He was coming out of his box and I was going in mine," Ragan said. "His crew chief or spotter, or whoever calls him out of the pits, possibly didn't see us coming in and our team didn't know he was ready to leave. He pulled out and I was pulling in."

Ragan's car did a half spin and skidded backwards into his pit box, where the crew alertly went ahead and changed the right side tires, the ones now nearest the wall, keeping the No. 6 on the lead lap. Despite the turn of events -- literally -- Ragan kept his wits about him.

"I actually backed up a little bit so I would be in the stall," Ragan said. "We need to prepare for that. I think we didn't know what to do for a few seconds and then they went on and changed the right-side tires to make sure the rights were on the right and the lefts were on left."

Surprisingly, Ragan only lost two positions despite the unorthodox stop. Harvick, however, would never again contend for the lead after having to repair major damage to the right front fender of his No. 29 Chevrolet.

Ragan had two problems from that point forward. One, a series of late-race cautions kept him bunched up behind lapped traffic. Two, he went from 14th to 20th during the final 20 laps as cars with fresher tires were able to get by.

"We had a lot of quick cautions there at the end that certainly hurt us," he said. "We had a top-10 car and finished 20th with it, so I don't know what that means, but we've got to do a little better than that."

Track position, not the pit-road incident, was Ragan's biggest frustration. Starting 29th, he worked his way into the top 20 by Lap 140 but struggled with traffic all day.

"We had a top-six, -seven or -eight car," Ragan said. "On that long green flag run, I felt like we were just about as good as it could get. Then we're battling lapped cars the whole day and I just got really frustrated."

So what was Ragan thinking while his car was facing the wrong way?

"I had a bird's-eye view of Clint Bowyer," he said. "We were nose-to-nose. That's not what we want to have happen, but when you're at a short track -- there was no harm done on our car, just poor track position."