Long Pond, PA (World Wide Gamble) - Series: NASCAR Sprint Cup. Date: Sunday, August 1. Race: Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500. Site: Pocono Raceway. Track: 2.5-mile triangle. Start time: 1:00 p.m. (et). Laps: 200. Miles: 500. 2009 winner: Denny Hamlin. Television: ESPN. Radio: Motor Racing Network (MRN) /SIRIUS NASCAR Radio.
Sprint Cup Series teams travel to Pocono Raceway for the second time within the past two months. If there is one driver who's looking forward to returning to Pocono the most, it's Denny Hamlin.
Pocono has been Hamlin's house lately. He won here one year ago and then again in June. If he wins Sunday's 500-mile race, he will become the third driver to score three consecutive victories at Pocono. Tim Richmond accomplished the feat from 1986-87, and Bobby Allison turned the trick from 1982-83.
Hamlin, currently third in points, is tied with Jimmie Johnson for most victories so far this season with five.
The driver with the most wins after the September 11 race in Richmond, VA will enter the championship Chase in the first seed. All 12 drivers who qualify for the playoffs -- the last 10 events of the season -- will have their point totals adjusted to 5,000. Each driver will then have 10 bonus points added for every race he won during the 26-event regular season.
"It's good that we're going back in a relatively close time frame; obviously, we run really well there," Hamlin said. "In my mind, we have a lot of really good tracks coming up. A lot of tracks that we just won at we're getting ready to go back to. We need to get two more wins I feel like before the Chase starts to kind of solidify where we will be bonus-points wise when we get to the Chase."
Hamlin is tied with Jeff Gordon, Rusty Wallace, Darrell Waltrip and Richmond for second most wins at Pocono with four. Bill Elliott holds the track record with five victories. Hamlin's first two wins at Pocono came during rookie season in 2006.
The battle for the top-12 spots in the Chase remains tight with six races to go before it begins. Heading into Pocono, 283 points separate eighth-place Matt Kenseth from 17th-place Kasey Kahne.
Clint Bowyer currently holds the 12th position, while 13th-place Mark Martin is 62 points behind Bowyer. Last year, Martin finished second in points and scored five victories. The 51-year-old driver has yet to win in 2010.
After winning the Brickyard 400 last Sunday, Jamie McMurray kept his Chase hopes alive, as he advanced two positions in the standings to 16th. McMurray, who became the third driver to win both the Daytona 500 and the 400-mile race at Indianapolis in the same season, is now 151 points out of 12th-place.
"Everyone wants to make the Chase," McMurray said. "Getting to win the Daytona 500 and the Brickyard 400 means more to me this year than making the Chase. This year or in 10 years, the guy that won that race one time everybody will talk about. The guy that finished third in the points, nobody cares. I would really like to be in the Chase, but I have no focus on that at all."
Pocono, dubbed "The Tricky Triangle," is one of the most unique tracks on the Cup schedule with its 2.5-mile triangular shape.
Though Indianapolis has a rectangular-shaped layout, Pocono somewhat resembles Indy, with both tracks having relatively flat banking. The banking in each of Indy's four turns is nine degrees, whereas Pocono's corners vary from six to 14 degrees.
The July race at Pocono used to run prior to Indianapolis until 2007. Now, Indy is scheduled one week before Pocono.
"It used to be that if you ran good at Pocono, then you had a good shot at running good at Indy," driver/owner Tony Stewart said. "I don't know if it's still correlated the last couple years with the new car. The thing about Indy is that it's got a couple little bumps here and there, but when you go to Pocono, it's rough and bumpy. The setups are quite a bit different now."
Forty-five teams are on the preliminary entry list for the Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500.
