TALLADEGA, Ala. – “Front Row Joe” is back on top. Finally.

Joe Nemechek took his first pole in four years and the seventh of his NASCAR Nextel Cup career Friday, earning the top spot for the EA Sports 500 at Talladega Superspeedway.

“We’ve been right on top of our game,” said Nemechek, who got his No. 01 Chevrolet around the steeply banked 2.66-mile at 190.749 mph. “You know, it’s about the car in qualifying. The car has got to be right and the engine has got to be right.

“When the race comes, that’s when the driver makes a difference.”

Newburgh native Ricky Craven, driving the No. 11 Old Spice Chevrolet for Joe Gibbs Racing for the first time, qualified 20th at 188.980 mph.

Nemechek, who earned his nickname with six Cup poles from 1997-2000, shook his head when reminded his last pole came at this track on Oct. 13, 2000, 133 races ago.

“That’s a long time,” Nemechek said. “They’re just so hard to get. The competition’s so tough. But we’ve been so close this year, doing a good job. We’ve had two outside poles and I felt like this was close.”

Ricky Rudd was second in a Ford at 190.609, followed by Dale Jarrett’s Taurus at 190.374 and the Chevy of Nemechek’s rookie MBV/MB2 Motorsports teammate Scott Riggs at 190.310.

The rest of the top 10 was made up of drivers who are part of NASCAR’s new 10-driver, 10-race playoff-style championship.

Series leader Jeff Gordon, winner of NASCAR’s last two races at Talladega and Daytona, the two tracks where NASCAR requires horsepower-sapping carburetor restrictor plates, had a solid fifth-place run. That set up his chance to match the late Dale Earnhardt on Sunday as the only driver to win three plate races in a season.

Gordon will go into the race, the third in the championship showdown, with a one-point lead over Kurt Busch, who qualified eighth on Friday at 189.676.

In between, were Elliott Sadler at 189.752 and defending series champion Matt Kenseth at 189.710, with Jeremy Mayfield ninth at 189.526 and Dale Earnhardt Jr. rounding out the top 10 at 189.481.

The other title contenders were farther back in the 43-car field, with Jimmie Johnson 16th, Mark Martin 17th, Ryan Newman 19th and Tony Stewart 30th.

Some drivers have talked about Sunday’s race being a pivotal one, but Gordon says they’re all going to be tough.

“In the next eight races, I think every lap is going to count and every position is going to count,” Gordon said. “We’re pretty happy with that qualifying run. We’ll just get the car out there in the draft tomorrow (in practice) and, hopefully, it will be real strong for the race.”

The younger Earnhardt, who has won four of the last five races at Talladega and finished second to Gordon here in April, said qualifying doesn’t mean too much at a track like this, where cars race two- and three-wide in huge packs and move up and back through the field as the race progresses.

“There is only one thing that’s seriously important to me and the team today, and that’s getting a good pit stall for the race,” Earnhardt said. “You don’t want a bad pit stall. It’s so hard to get on and off pit road here. It’s important to qualify well so you can choose a good pit stall.”

Group plans protest

A group calling itself the National Association for Minority Race Fans was offered a site for planned protests this weekend during NASCAR’s events at Talladega Superspeedway.

Track president Grant Lynch said he talked with representatives of the association for the first time Friday but didn’t learn a lot about its plans.

“Unfortunately, our conversations with the group have not been very informative,” Lynch said before the start of qualifying for Sunday’s EA Sports 500 NASCAR Nextel Cup race. “We don’t really know exactly when they’re coming. We don’t really know where they’re coming from. And we don’t really know how many of them are coming.”

The group sent a letter to the state asking to be able to hold a peaceful demonstration at Talladega, prompting track officials to meet with highway patrol and sheriff’s department representatives to determine a site.

The protest can be set up in a nearly 7-acre field about a quarter of a mile from the track’s main entrance. The site is normally used for overflow parking.

Calls to the association were not returned.

On Friday, its Web site carried a message that read in part: “In what we hope is a pivotal, positive step toward providing a safer haven for minority race fans, NASCAR has contacted NAMRF. The two organizations are currently in negotiations concerning a plan to resolve our philosophical differences and develop a more acceptable comprehensive diversity plan.”

The site said there would be a protest at Talladega but did not give any details.

“We called them because we certainly want to speak to anyone who wants to talk about the issue of diversity and who wants to bring, perhaps, some good, constructive ideas to the table,” NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said. “We’ve also offered to meet with them and they’ve not responded to that as of yet.”

Poston said the use of the word “negotiations” on the Web site was “probably a mischaracterization of where we are right now.”

One driver and only a handful of crewmen in NASCAR’s top three divisions are black. In an effort to increase diversity, the sport set up a committee to address the issue, with Magic Johnson as co-chairman.