Johnson, Gordon are on familiar turf

On April 1, teammates Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon dueled fiercely to a 1-2 finish in Martinsville, Va., hinting strongly that this year’s Nextel Cup championship would be a season-long duel between them.

Having lived up to that preview, they’re back at little Martinsville Speedway for a rematch in today’s Subway 500.

Gordon, who leads the Chase playoffs by 68 points over Johnson, will start on the pole. Johnson will start fourth. Each has six wins this season. Gordon has seven career wins on the track, but Johnson has won the last two.

This time, Gordon thinks he might have a little more for Johnson than in the spring, when Johnson held him off by half a car length as they slammed and banged to the finish line.

“If it comes down to a situation like that again, I’m more concerned with getting our car to turn and be able to accelerate up underneath him to make a clean pass,” Gordon said, referring to teams’ chronic difficulties getting the Car of Tomorrow to turn properly on short tracks.

If the roles are reversed today -- if Gordon leads late, with Johnson second -- Johnson has no qualms about using Gordon’s tactics.

“If I am in second, there are certain things you can do on a short track to try to get position,” Johnson said. “Jeff used everything he could without crossing the line when we were here in the spring.”

-- Ed Hinton

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Joey Logano won the fifth annual NASCAR Toyota All-Star Showdown stock-car race at Irwindale Speedway.

The 17-year-old held off Peyton Sellers to win the 250-lap race on the half-mile oval, a showcase event for top drivers in NASCAR’s Grand National and other minor-league series.

Mike Duncan of Bakersfield was third and Matt Kobyluck, last year’s Showdown winner, was fourth.

Logano, who qualified for the race by winning NASCAR’s Busch East Series, is a rising star for Joe Gibbs Racing, whose NASCAR Nextel Cup drivers include Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin.

“We just had a great race,” Logano said. “I’ve just got a lot of confidence. And there’s a great team behind me.”

He also got help when other front-runners in the 40-car field found trouble.

Pole-sitter Sean Caisse led most of the opening 70 laps. But as he moved through lapped traffic, his Chevrolet was hit from behind by Escondido native Moses Smith, sending Caisse into the wall and out of the race.

Before the race, Irwindale Speedway held a moment of silence in honor of veteran Times motor sports writer Shav Glick, who died Saturday at age 87.

-- Jim Peltz

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Mike Skinner sneaked into the lead and held off Jack Sprague for the final 66 laps to win the caution-filled Kroger 200 Craftsman Truck Series race at Martinsville Speedway. . . . Felipe Massa took the pole for the decisive Brazilian Grand Prix in Sao Paulo, with overall leader Lewis Hamilton beside him in position to become Formula One’s youngest champion. . . . Will Power, racing for Team Australia, posted a qualifying lap record time of 1 minute 30.054 seconds in the 30-minute qualifying session for the Lexmark Indy 300 in Surfers Paradise, Australia.