RICHMOND, Va. -- Through each of their separate hazes of smoke that occurred while they wrecked during Saturday night's Crown Royal 400 at Richmond International Raceway, Jeff Burton, Mark Martin, Jamie McMurray and Marcos Ambrose would've never thought a top-10 finish was possible.

“

I still say it's not necessarily the guy in Victory Lane every week who did the best job; it's the guy that found a way to make something out of something that didn't look good.

”

JEFF BURTON

New tires brought Burton to third and Martin to fifth, while McMurray, who didn't pit, held on for seventh. Ambrose only missed his third top-10 in the last six races by one spot, when he finished 11th. And even Sam Hornish Jr., who won two IndyCar Series races here, stormed into a career-best sixth place, the second time he's done that in the last three races.

None of comeback drivers was involved in anything significant for the race's first 168 laps, when five of the event's 15 cautions occurred. From then on one metal-grinding mishap after another hit many contenders, but these guys emerged from the 400-lap melee smiling.

"Oh, no -- I have to be honest, when I was sliding through the infield and into Carl, I never thought we could finish like this," McMurray said, referring to his crash with teammate Carl Edwards. "We got a lap down because we waited a little too long to pit that first run, and our car was a little bit too tight, but once we got our lap back I thought we were in good shape because the car drove really well."

Then McMurray got the smoky party started when David Stremme and Edwards got together coming off Turn 4 on Lap 168, with Edwards' No. 99 Ford spinning into the infield grass. McMurray spun behind him and ended up hitting Edwards' car.

"We got caught up in that wreck and it's amazing sometimes how you can hit the wall with these cars and it knocks the steering out, the toe out and everything," McMurray said. "And then there's other times like, when I hit Carl I thought, 'That's it, we're done, this is probably destroyed.' And it wasn't even tore up. We came back and the car drove really, really good."

As the race's end game played out, McMurray opted to stay on track rather than taking tires. With a raft of lapped cars interspersed with the leaders, he only fell from third on Lap 359 to seventh at the finish.

"We saw in practice that guys with four- or five-lap fresher tires could run a tenth [of a second] quicker," McMurray said of caution flags winning out over new tires late in the race. "I was just yelling that I wanted tires at the end but we just had a good enough car to kind of hang on and the guys that put tires on caught us with just a few laps to go, so we were able to hold them off.

"When you're on the pit box and you're watching lap times, you see more than what just the drivers do, so Donnie [Wingo, crew chief] did a good job making us stay out and we had a good enough car to hang on. At the end our car was just the best it was, but [Saturday] we got to have some great luck with the way the cautions fell. It couldn't have went much better for us." (Continued)