Coca Cola 600

[fullSPEED]

On Thursday, Ryan Newman established a new track record and captured the pole position for Sunday night’s Coca Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. He circled the 1.5 mile track in a record 27.981 seconds, eclipsing his old mark of 28.590 seconds set last fall. It was his fourth pole position victory this season and the 31st of his career. Starting on the front row with him was Jeff Gordon. Matt Kenseth and Kasey Kahne started in row two.

[rustyfan]

A couple of minutes until the coverage starts here in Sweden. Hopefully it will be at least half as good a race as the Indianapolis 500

EDIT - Perhaps a moderator could edit the thread title to include * SPOILERS *, in case someone else but me will visit this thread during the race?

[rustyfan]

The race is underway. Newman leads, from the pole.

And, g'damn, I'm getting Swedish commentary instead of the original US commentary I usually get

[rustyfan]

Well over five hours later, with the red flag out and 9 laps to go, I think it's safe to say that this edition of the Coke 600 will go down in history as one of the wildest ones ever

[VilleneuveTracy]

It was a pretty boring race IMO, due to the 22 cautions. The utter Hendrick domination was very impressive. Roush has had all of its cars run well a few times this year and last year but never have they completely dominated like Hendrick Motorsports did during the 600 by clearly having the four best cars and running 1-2-3-4 until luck intervened and ruined the race for Gordon, Kyle Busch and Vicker's mistake that took him, as well as JG, out of the race.

[rustyfan]

Originally Posted by VilleneuveTracy

It was a pretty boring race IMO, due to the 22 cautions.

No argument from me on that one, althought it did get pretty exciting after that final restart. Would have been great to see Labonte win it, but since Johnson had fresher tires I'm actually a bit surprised Labonte managed to hold Johnson off as long as he did.

[VilleneuveTracy]

I agree. What was impressive was how quickly Johnson moved through the field. Prior to that the #24 and #25 were on par with Johnson but they were not able to get through traffic at the end like Johnson, and eventually wrecked. Biffle, Harvick, and Sadler were not that much slower than Johnson before 90% of the leaders were caught a lap down during but Biffle was able to climb to only 6th while Harvick managed to finish a dissapointing 14th.