By Bruce Martin PA SportsTicker Contributing Editor

MARTINSVILLE, Virginia (Ticker) – Jeff Gordon’s “Drive for Five” championships got a little smoother on Friday when the NASCAR Nextel Cup points leader won the pole for Sunday’s Subway 500 at Martinsville Speedway.

Gordon won his 63rd career pole and his sixth around the flat, .526-mile paper-clip shaped track with a lap at 94.974 miles per hour in a Chevrolet Impala SS.

It is Gordon’s seventh pole and 19th top-10 start this season.

“I felt like I had a great car in practice and a shot at the pole today,” said Gordon, who along with his competitors had limited practice time because of intermittent rain on Friday. “I knew what I had in practice and knew what I thought it would take to win the pole. I overdrove it on the first lap and slipped on the first lap and thought I really blew it.

“The next lap, I just needed to get it into the corner and backed the pace down and it was good enough to get the pole.”

Gordon enters Sunday’s 500-lapper with a 68-point lead over Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson, who qualified fourth.

The short track is one of Gordon’s best as the four-time Cup champion has seven wins, 17 top-five and 23 top-10 finishes in 29 starts at Martinsville.

“I love Martinsville,” Gordon said. “I just really hit on some things here in my career. I really like this track and when you like a track and run well at this track all you have to do is fine-tune your setup each time. I wasn’t sure what this new car (Car of Tomorrow) would be like but it’s suiting me now.”

The top-four cars were Chevy Impalas with Martin Truex Jr. second at 94.737 mph and Kevin Harvick third at 94.685 mph.

Seven of the top eight cars were Chevrolets. Kasey Kahne’s Dodge was the only one to break up the Chevy charge as he was fifth at 94.585 mph.

Gordon has won the last two races in The Chase, including last Saturday night’s Bank of America 500 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway and the UAW-Ford 500 at Talladega Superspeedway.

But Gordon knows that starting on the pole doesn’t guarantee a similar finish but it does have one very important caveat.

“The most important part of it is the No. 1 in pit stall,” Gordon said. “You can stay out of trouble on pit road because pit road here is really treacherous. It can be huge to save your fenders. It doesn’t guarantee anything though.”

Clint Bowyer is third in The Chase and qualified 21st at 94.031 mph in a Chevrolet. Tony Stewart is fourth in The Chase but 198 points out of the lead. He lines up far back in the pack in 34th place after a lap at 93.553 mph.

Gordon’s season has that championship look and that could demoralize his competitors.

“Sometimes that motivates guys and gets them ticked off and makes them push even harder,” Gordon said. “We don’t want to get complacent and get away from what we’ve done so far this year. If we go out there and have a fifth-place car, we need to come home with a fifth-place finish.

“I’m not focused on demoralizing anybody; I just want to get the best finish that we can get.”

Truex is 11th in points, 378 points out of the lead and knows his chance at The Chase is over. But the Dale Earnhardt Inc. driver remains motivated with his front row start.

“I was real, real happy with the car,” Truex said. “We did race stuff and then it rained so I was really surprised at how the car drove because it was unknown in qualifying. I’m a little disappointed to be second again. It’s the third time this year and I really want to get my guys a pole this year and get them in the Bud Shootout.”

Harvick is another driver who isn’t going to win the title as he is eighth in points, 328 out of the lead. But to a true racer, there is always motivation to beat the other guy.

“You should have been at my house last night and seen why they call us racers,” Harvick said. “We raced go-karts last night and you would have thought we were racing for $1 million. You race as hard as you can to get the best finish every week. For us, we’ve had a miserable Chase. It’s not performance based by any means. Last week, we had three flat tires.

“You just laugh about them now because you don’t know why they happen, they just happen.”

Drivers who failed to make the field included three-time IndyCar Series champion and 2006 Indianapolis 500 winner Sam Hornish Jr., the last driver bumped out of the field, Joe Nemechek, Brian Vickers, Jeremy Mayfield and Kevin Lepage.