Around The Track: Corners key at M'ville

When Ricky Rudd takes the green flag for Sunday's Virginia 500 at Martinsville Speedway, it will mark his 47th consecutive start and 48th career start at the flat Virginia half-mile track. Rudd, who made his Martinsville debut in 1977, has three wins and four poles on the track that was once known for burning up brakes and its difficult one-groove racing. His statistics at Martinsville also include 13 top-fives and 19 top-10s.

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Martinsville is a unique track. It almost makes you think of a parking lot. Just imagine if someone set cones up at each end of the parking lot and told you to go down and circle that cone and come back as quickly as you can -- that's Martinsville.

The straightaways are relatively long for the tight arc and the tight radius of the corners of the track. When you go down the straightaway and into the corner, there is no trick other than you drive as deep as you possibly can before you use the brakes.

In a qualifying lap that is not a big deal; you charge the corner as hard as you can and use as much brake as you can. The key to running a fast qualifying lap at Martinsville is keeping the car rolling through the middle of the corner. All of the teams fight that. You will hear them say, 'The car won't turn in the middle of the corner.' You hear that statement quite a bit.

If you get the car to go down and turn in the middle of the corner, that allows for a quicker lap time because the car doesn't spend any time slipping and sliding. It just goes in there and hooks right around the bottom of the racetrack. You want the left side wheels right down there against the curb. When you are really good there you will see yellow paint on the left side tires because the curbs are painted yellow, and you are able to go down there and have the car stick well enough that the tires will actually pick up some paint. When you get a car doing that, you know you are going to be pretty competitive, pretty racy.

Martinsville has changed the track surface, though. We ran the last race there on the new surface. They ground the concrete to try to smooth the track out; what they succeeded in doing is taking some speed and grip out of the lower groove. A lot of competitors complained about it at the last race, but it actually made for one of the best races Martinsville has ever had.

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The bottom groove is always the preferential groove when you are racing. With the ground surface it has taken some grip out of the bottom groove and what it has done is evened up lap times, whether you run the bottom groove or the second groove up. Those two lanes are now pretty equal to one another so it has made for some exciting racing.

If you can get a car to run really good on the bottom of the racetrack, it is going to be good when you move up, and we saw that the last race. We had a competitive race car were able to run on the bottom where a lot of cars were not with the new track configuration. We had to work on that a lot, making sure the car didn't spin the tires up off the corner and that we could really put the throttle down.

Also, Martinsville is a track where people had run out of brakes in the past. But brake technology today allows you to use any amount of brake you want to and not be really concerned about getting to the end of the race and still keeping brakes.

Ricky Rudd drives the No. 21 Motorcraft Racing Ford Taurus owned by Wood Brothers Racing.