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MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- Martinsville Speedway remains one of stock-car racing's most delightful anachronisms, a true throwback to NASCAR's old-school roots. The sport that descends twice a year into the Virginia hills is far more modern than it was when it began racing here on dirt in 1949, but the challenge of winning on the premier series' tightest track has never grown old.
Winning here requires uncommon finesse and all the precision of the track's well-crafted grandfather clock trophies. Predicting a winner here usually requires less savviness, with a handful of favorites to choose from on a short list that's become even shorter this season.
Three drivers -- Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Denny Hamlin -- have shared a virtual lock on Martinsville's clock in recent years, winning 19 of the last 26 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series races on the .526-mile oval that Clay Earles founded nearly 70 years ago. With Gordon trading in his driving gloves for a broadcasting microphone this season, the crowd living in the Martinsville stratosphere has lost a fellow dominator.
Johnson and Hamlin have a chance to reassert their Martinsville mastery in this Sunday's STP 500 (1 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM), the first short-track race of the Sprint Cup season. But the door is open for a third party to announce their candidacy for the Martinsville elite.
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Johnson's eight victories on the historic track rank just one behind his former Hendrick Motorsports teammate Gordon on the all-time list. But his five-race drought -- a relatively long dry spell as it relates to Johnson and Martinsville -- clearly weighs as the current priority.
"I think this weekend is going to be back to our old ways," Johnson said earlier this week. "Things evolve and we feel like may have taken our cars and setups in a direction that hasn't been too good for us. Over the off weekend, I'm hopeful that what (team engineers) Julian (Pena) and Cliff (Daniels) have kind of dug up and the mindset we're taking is going to prove out. I'm very optimistic we'll get back to our old ways. We haven't been where we've wanted to be and we have tried to evolve and change and advance the cars, and I think we needed a couple of steps back to be fast."
Hamlin, the other current resident in the Martinsville ether, has to only rewind to last March to relive the most recent of his five home-state wins. The Joe Gibbs Racing driver likened the feeling of walking through the Martinsville tunnel to showing up at his home track in the go-karting days of his childhood and riding the confidence that stems from being in a familiar place.
But in sizing up his biggest competition at the track where he's enjoyed the most success, Hamlin called his own number.
"Myself -- I don't know how many pit road penalties I've had here at this race track or why I choose to push it on pit road knowing that I have the speed on the race track that we've shown," Hamlin said Friday. "I think I've had two in the last bunch of races, just consecutively. That's been a challenge and last year in the fall race I beat up my car pretty good trying to come back through the pack the second time or maybe it was the first time I had a penalty. I think it's me just being a little more cautious on pit road and making sure that I've got a car that can finish the race with all four fenders."
The prime candidate to replace Gordon in the Martinsville triumvirate might be Joey Logano, who won his third straight Coors Light Pole Award at the track in Friday's qualifying. He'll have the benefit of the first pit stall in Sunday's 500-lapper as he searches for his first Sprint Cup grandfather clock to match the one he brought home in the Camping World Truck Series last March.
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But Logano will also have to overcome the hard feelings from the most recent Martinsville race, where Matt Kenseth intentionally wrecked him from victory contention last November. It's part of a twofold goal for the Team Penske driver this weekend: turning a negative into a positive from last fall's altercation and backing up the No. 22 Ford's qualifying speed in the main event.
"To be quite honest with you it's hard to erase it from your mind. It happened. It's in the past though, but it is something that drives you," Logano said. "You've got to use things like that to motivate you -- not only you and your team. I think re-watching the race and stuff like that, if that doesn't give you a little fire, nothing does. I know I felt really excited and really pumped up and jacked up to come to this race track and show what we're made out of. This is a good start."