Needing perfection, Newman grabs pole

He's in ninth place, 271 points behind series leader Kurt Busch.
MARTINSVILLE, Va. (AP) -- Ryan Newman must be close to perfect the rest of the way to win the Nextel Cup championship, and he took a positive step by grabbing the pole Friday at Martinsville Speedway.
"It's a good start to the entire weekend," said Newman, ninth among 10 drivers and 271 points behind series leader Kurt Busch halfway through NASCAR's 10-race playoff.
Five to go
Newman needs outstanding finishes in the final five races, and quite a bit of good luck. The narrow half-mile oval at Martinsville -- where bunched fields frequently leads to crashes -- might be a good place to find a little good fortune.
Like six of the other drivers in the title chase, Newman can't contend without bad finishes by Busch, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon, who have been turning the competition into a three-way battle.
"We're looking for places to make up major ground because we need that now," Newman said. "We're not out of the championship by any means. We're not in the best position, but we'll keep our nose to the grindstone."
Busch won't dispute that Martinsville could be one of the keys to the points race.
"This is a race where it could knock the top three out and it could be a 10-car race," he said. "It could go either way.
"It's just one of the toughest places we go to. You just have to be good when it counts."
Another view
But Earnhardt, the only driver with five consecutive top-five finishes here, disputes that Martinsville's beating and banging style makes it particularly dicey for drivers with championship aspirations.
"Anything can happen anywhere," he said. "Motors break here, they break in Atlanta, they break in Phoenix. It's the same."
Newman led the way on the newly resurfaced oval where 17 drivers broke the track qualifying record. He turned a lap at 97.043 mph to win his series-high seventh pole of the season, breaking Tony Stewart's four-year-old mark of 95.371.
Newman's Dodge will be joined on the front row by that of teammate Rusty Wallace, who qualified for Sunday's Subway 500 at 96.234.
The Chevrolets of Earnhardt and Ward Burton make up the second row, followed by Travis Kvapil in a Dodge and Scott Riggs' Chevy.
Busch, who leads Earnhardt by 24 points in the race for the championship, was seventh as the first Ford on the starting grid.
Top trio
Busch, Earnhardt and Newman are the only drivers in contention for the championship who will start in the top 10. Gordon, 74 points behind Busch, will start 15th.
Elliott Sadler, fourth among the chasers, will start 33rd. But that doesn't mean he can't win. Busch started 36th two years ago, but grabbed the lead with 91 laps to go and held off Johnny Benson to win.
Sunday's race, and a truck race today, will be the first for the series since the track was completely resurfaced after the spring races.
Gordon, whose bid for a third consecutive victory here ended in the spring when a chunk of track came loose in a turn and damaged his car, struggled to regain that advantage even after testing last week.
Reigning series champion Matt Kenseth was seventh-fastest in practice, but qualified 25th.