Nemechek due for luck

--------

? Joe Nemechek is back at Richmond International Raceway as a defending champion with a new ride and mixed emotions.

A year ago, Nemechek was driving for powerhouse Hendrick Motorsports when he won the rain-shortened spring race on the three-quarter-mile oval. Now, he’s with MB2 Motorsports, the team for which Jerry Nadeau drove a year ago when a crash here in practice nearly killed him.

“It’s sad that one thing happened,” Nemechek said of Nadeau’s crash, which continues to sideline the driver. “But it makes me feel good coming back because I won this race last year, and I know I can win it again.”

It was the third career victory, all in the last five years, for the 40-year-old journeyman who has driven for 10 owners in the Nextel Cup series. Nemechek will enter Saturday night’s Chevy American Revolution 400 20th in the series standings after 10 races, but says he could be much higher with a little bit of good luck .

“We’ve had top-10 cars for the last five weeks, and something happens to us every week,” he said, listing a broken spark plug, a hole in the radiator and a fuel mileage miscalculation among his misfortunes.

But he views his return to Richmond for the season’s first night race as a chance to start over again with expectations of success.

“You have that history,” he said. “You know what your car needs to feel like to go good. The tough thing about here is you practice during the day, you qualify during the day, you have Happy Hour during the day, and then you race at nighttime.

“So it’s totally different. You’ve got to do some guessing on the car and now, with the new asphalt, you don’t know.”

The racing surface, torn up last October, had been in place since 1988. The new asphalt is smoother and faster, and expectations vary on how it will respond to racing this weekend.

Joe Nemechek celebrates winning the Pontiac Excitement 400 at Richmond International Raceway on May 3, 2003. Nemechek hopes to repeat Saturday at Richmond, Va., in the Chevy American Revolution 400.

To a man, though, the drivers look forward to getting behind the wheel for the start of the race as the sun begins to set, the air starts to cool and flash bulbs pop incessantly during warmup laps.

“It’s better for the fans, and I think the drivers like it better, too,” said Jeff Green, who drives the famed No. 43 for Petty Enterprises. “It’s back to our roots of Saturday night short-track racing.”

That style translates to considerable aggressiveness as drivers teeter along the line between acceptable contact and blatant disregard for their brethren.

Rusty Wallace, the winner of 25 short-track events in his career, said his first- and second-place finishes on short tracks this year are as much a tribute to his ability to preserve his car as anything else.

“You have to save your stuff and have what you need at the end,” he said. At Bristol and then Martinsville this year, “there were a bunch of guys who had beaten and banged all race long — abused their stuff — and I didn’t see any of them up there with us fighting for the win.”