Qualifying was rained out, so Tony Stewart got the Pole position, but with his engine change, he had to start in the back.
It didn't matter one bit.
Jimmie Johnson led, Carl Edwards led and so did Jeff Gordon, but It only took him a handful of laps to get to the front.
Denny Hamlin brought out the first caution on lap one, when his car simply died. He had absolutely no power and the crew went to work, but he would never be in contention, even though he'd been the favorite in many fantasy racing leagues and polls.
Concrete Carl and JJ took their turns up front, but both had a few problems and they would finish second and seventh respectively. The race featured a long green flag run that came close to breaking the record of 92 caution free laps, but one of the rare cautions of the race prevented that from happening.
Weather was not predicted to be an issue, but we did get a caution for rain in the second half of the race.
The one thing about Pocono was fuel. Unfortunately, all too often fuel mileage comes into the equation here and today was no exception. Jimmie Johnson was running third with two laps to go and ran out in the tunnel turn, as did a few other cars. David Reutimann was the third place car, and Jimmie's teammate, Jeff, finished in 4th, after having to start behind the lap down cars for pitting to top up on fuel.
Tony's teammate, Ryan Newman, had an issue with a spark plug early on, but he managed to come back to finish in 5th.
All in all, it was a typical Pocono race, with two exceptions, Smoke won as an owner/driver after leading the last 37 laps and the double file restarts proved to be a success.
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