INDIANAPOLIS -- While Sunday's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard looked like a disaster in the making to almost everyone else right from the start, Elliott Sadler saw an opportunity for his struggling No. 19 Dodge team.

So as many of the Goodyear tires handed out to all teams literally returned to dust, and NASCAR tried to manage the calamity by throwing one competition caution after another in rapid and annoying fashion at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Sadler employed a sound strategy that eventually paid off with his best finish of the 2008 Sprint Cup Series season.

“

You know, we're not kissing the bricks. But a fourth-place finish for our team right now is a job well done.

”

ELLIOTT SADLER

Saving wear on his tires whenever possible by not pushing his car too hard until the very end, Sadler ended up finishing fourth -- trailing only eventual winner Jimmie Johnson, second-place finisher Carl Edwards and Denny Hamlin, who placed third.

Sadler knew tire wear was going to be an issue even before the green flag dropped. He said he was expecting a caution-filled race similar to the one at the Coca-Cola 600 in May of 2005, when tire problems led to a record 22 yellow flags.

"I told everybody before the race, 'Hey, look, at Charlotte we just ran a certain lap time no matter what.' That's what we did," Sadler said. "If somebody came up on us and wanted to pass us, we let 'em go. We raced the racetrack until there were about 30 or 40 laps to go. Then we started racing hard -- and it paid off for us."

In the end, Sadler was more than satisfied. He was all smiles.

"You know, we're not kissing the bricks. Congratulations to Jimmie Johnson and those guys for that," Sadler said. "But a fourth-place finish for our team right now is a job well done."

Sadler has had some good runs this season in his Gillett Evernham Motorsports Dodge. He finished sixth in the season-opening Daytona 500 in February, eighth at the Coca-Cola 600 in May, ninth at Michigan in June and fifth at New Hampshire just three races ago.

But he has endured more than his share of hard luck, finishing dead last 43rd at Atlanta, 42nd at both Darlington and Dover, 41st at Phoenix after qualifying second, 39th in July's return visit to Daytona and 34th at Pocono. There were other races, such as Infineon, when he was running up front until the very end when Schleprock struck -- relegating him to a 19th-place finish after he qualified sixth and appeared destined for at least a top-five finish before a tire went down during the final laps.

Everything combined to leave him mired in 23rd in the standings heading into Sunday's event. His promising finish allowed him to move up two spots to 21st.

"We just wanted to run like we can and finish like we should," Sadler said. "We've got to just come to the track and run like we're supposed to each and every week, and forget the bad-luck crisis. It was good to run well like we did [Sunday]. We just raced the racetrack and stayed out of trouble, and then we had the good run there at the end."

Sadler even led five laps Sunday. He had led laps in three other races this season, but finished 29th in one (at Talladega) and 34th in another (at Pocono).

During a competition caution with 37 laps to go Sunday, Sadler took on four fresh tires while others took on only two and fell out of the top 10 after having led from Lap 101 through Lap 105. He dropped all the way back to 14th, in fact, and had to wonder if bad luck and another disappointing finish to a promising day were lurking right around the next left turn.

He was determined to make certain it didn't, figuring he was in a new car built for this occasion. He was thinking the new car equaled new luck.

"I passed a lot of cars to come back to the front," he said. "It's pretty cool to come out with a new car and get a good run like this."

Sadler eventually worked his way back up to second behind then-leader Denny Hamlin. But during the final pit stop of the day -- brought about by the sixth competition caution (out of 11 cautions overall) -- he dropped back a little and eventually had to settle for fourth.

"When we got up to second, I thought we might have a shot at 'em [for the win]," Sadler said. "We just needed to come out on that last pit stop in either first or second. Clean air meant so much.

"You have to hand it to Jimmie Johnson and his guys. They had a great pit stop at the end, got out in clean air, and won the race. I'm proud of what we were able to accomplish, though. We got a top-five finish out of the Brickyard, where everybody brings their best stuff. That gives us a lot of optimism to build on for the rest of the year."

In the end, Sadler believed that his team made the most of what was a trying day for everyone because of the deplorable tire situation.

"It was tough on everybody because you never really knew how hard to race, and who to race, and when to race," Sadler said. "That's why we just said as a team that we were going to try to race the racetrack. If they wanted to come up and pass us and make their way to the front, we just kept falling back and falling back. We just wanted to make sure our tires lasted, and my car was in one piece until we made it to the end.

"It's tough to have to race like that and have a caution every 10 laps. That's not what NASCAR racing is all about. But I'm sure they'll get to the bottom of it and fix it. On the plus side, we ran well all day. ... It all came together for us, and we really needed something like this."