Score one for the old guys, the journeymen of NASCAR.
Johnny Benson, 39, who’d gone 0-for-226 in nearly seven years on the Winston Cup tour, won at last Sunday.
Against a tidal wave of young-gun winners this season, Benson was the first driver older than 31 to win in the last 11 races.
And it wasn’t a fluke. Benson earned it, holding off every trick and move Mark Martin could throw at him in the final 10 laps of the Pop Secret 400 at North Carolina Speedway.
“We’ve been close I don’t know how many times,” said Benson, who two weeks ago lost a similar duel to 24-year-old Kurt Busch at Martinsville, Va. “I hate it’s taken this long to win, but we’ve been right there a lot.”
Even Martin, an old guard stalwart himself at 43, was happy for the Grand Rapids, Mich., Pontiac driver who’s well-liked around the garages but has been mainly just a friendly face in the crowd.
“It was good to see Johnny get a win–long overdue,” Martin said. “We put the full-court press on him. I was overdriving the fool out of my car. I knew I was going to make it exciting, but I knew I didn’t have the car to beat him.”
But, just being so atypically up front near the end, “I knew Johnny was going to be getting pretty nervous with the pressure,” Martin said, “and I laid some pretty good pressure on him. I just couldn’t make it stick.”
“I wouldn’t say I was nervous, but you’re always concerned that somebody’s going to come and beat you,” said Benson, who held off Martin by 0.261 seconds and became the fifth first-time winner this season. “I was just glad it was Mark Martin behind me. He was right there. Mark’s a great, clean racer.”
Just Benson’s style. He kept reiterating that “I’m glad we could get it done clean.”
In an era when knocking other drivers out of the way to win is considered part of the game, “Johnny is a nice guy–it’s just that simple,” said his crew chief, James Ince. “Johnny didn’t want to win at Martinsville the way he could have won,” meaning Benson could easily have bumped Busch out of the groove and passed.
Martin’s second-place finish appeared at first to take a big bite out of Tony Stewart’s points lead, as Stewart struggled with an ill-handling car to a 14th-place finish.
But two hours after the race, NASCAR officials found an improper spring in the left front of Martin’s Ford.
Martin cut Stewart’s lead from 146 points to 87, with two races left. But if NASCAR follows this year’s common procedure of penalizing drivers 25 points for unapproved parts, Martin could drop to 112 points behind on Monday.
Rookie sensation Jimmie Johnson, who’s been challenging for the championship all season, limped to a 37th-place finish with a damaged right rear wheel hub. He held on to third place in the standings but fell 219 points behind Stewart.
Busch threatened for most of the day to win a third straight Cup race but wound up third.
When a caution came out with 100 laps to go, “I knew that was the perfect number to [hurt] us,” Busch said. “Our car was guaranteed to go fast for 65 laps (on a set of tires following a pit stop), but we couldn’t hold on for the other 35.”Actually, Busch led until only 28 laps remained, when Benson took charge for keeps.
The ever-optimistic Benson said he “never” thought that first big win would never happen, even at low points such as the four races he missed last summer with rib injuries. Said Benson: “If I’d thought that, I’d go find something else to do.”
