Weather permitting, Winston Cup teams will qualify this Friday for Sunday’s Old Dominion 500 at Martinsville Speedway.

It would be the first time in three weeks that rain didn’t wash out time trials in NASCAR’s top series. The starting grids at Talladega and Lowe’s Motor Speedway at Charlotte were both set based on the NASCAR rulebook.

Qualifying at Martinsville takes on special importance, however, because of the nature of racing at the .526-mile track.

“You have to worry so much about so many different things,” said John Andretti, who came from a lap down to win the spring race at Martinsville in 1999. “You have to save your brakes, keep your front fenders on your car and keep from running into other cars. It seems like you worry more about what could go wrong than what could go right.”

The first thing that can go wrong for a driver at Martinsville is a poor effort in qualifying.

In over 90 races at this historic southern Virginia track, no winner has ever started further back than 24th. Only seven winners have started worse than 15th.

Once, such statistics were common at Winston Cup tracks. By the end of the 1998 season, for example, only seven of 910 races at Cup tracks still on the schedule had been won by cars starting 31st or worst.

Since the start of the 1999 season, it has happened 12 times in 135 races.

With its long straightaways, tight turns and flat surface, Martinsville Speedway presents many challenges to Winston Cup drivers.

Before the ’99 season began, cars starting outside the top 20 had won only 6.2 percent of the series’ races. Since then, that figure has jumped to 23.7 percent.

Martinsville, however, has bucked the trend.

The winner’s average starting spot at Martinsville is 6.5, the lowest of any oval on the circuit. Only on the road courses at Infineon Raceway (5.1) and Watkins Glen (5.5) is the average lower.

Why?

For one thing, it always has been tough to pass on the paperclip-shaped track.

That task may be even more difficult this time around since track officials ground the concrete surface of its turns.

“It looked to me like somebody took a straight edge and made it really jagged,” said Bobby Hamilton, who ran 540 laps in a recent test. “We had just got it to where we could race two wide all the way around the track and now it seems like it gets loose in the top groove.

“If we have a lot of cautions, and people stay two wide, it will keep the rubber from the tires spread out all over the racetrack. But if we stay at the bottom of the track to race, then we’ll have a huge amount of rubber built up on the top groove. Then it will be slick up there and you’ll see a lot of wrecks.”

If the newly ground concrete chews up tires the way some expect, another way to make up ground lost to a poor qualifying effort might be taken away from the teams as well.

If teams can’t do fuel-only or two-tire pit stops to gain track position, starting back in the pack could be an even more daunting task than it historically has been at Martinsville.

There’s also the challenge presented by pit road itself, which begins in Turn 4, runs the length of the frontstretch and wraps around toward the exit of Turn 2. It’s among the tightest and most treacherous in the NASCAR circuit.

Teams choose pit stalls based on how well they qualify, and the dividends of getting a spot near the pit exit can accumulate over the course of a race, especially if frequent cautions and tire wear bring cars in more often.

“It’s a long day and a lot can happen,” Jerry Nadeau said of a race at Martinsville. “It’s a fun day, but it can get frustrating trying to get to the front. There are a lot of short-track spins that you need to avoid, but if you can stay out of trouble and save your equipment, you can have a good Sunday.”

And having a good Friday certainly helps.