Newburgh’s Ricky Craven gained 33 points on Elliott Sadler with his 12th-place finish in the Pop Secret Microwave 400 at North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham, N.C., Sunday and has closed to within 16 points of Sadler in his bid to finish in the top 20 in the NASCAR Winston Cup points race.

Sadler, who is 20th in the points, is 77 points behind 18th-place Jerry Nadeau. Sadler finished 23rd in the race.

Craven had qualified for the outside pole at Rockingham but his Tide No. 32 Ford Taurus was tight in the early stages. That made handling a chore and Craven fell back to sixth.

The car remained tight through the middle of the turns and Craven wavered between 12th and 15th place.

Crew chief Mike Beam summoned Craven for a pit stop on lap 174 but as Craven began to enter the pit, Carl Long spun on the track. Expecting a caution flag, Beam told Craven to leave the pit and return to the track. The crew had already jumped out to service the car so when Craven kept going, he ran over the air gun hose which earned him a stop-and-go penalty from NASCAR.

The hose hit pit crew trainer and front tire catcher Wayne DeLoriea and his leg sustained major bruising and swelling.

Craven emerged one lap down on lap 187 but returned to the lead lap three laps later.

He was running 10th when he was lapped by eventual winner Joe Nemechek on lap 252.

Craven ran consistently fast laps the rest of the way, pitted two more times for fuel and minor adjustments to improve the handling, and wound up 12th.

It was his ninth top-12 finish in 33 races and third in the last four.

Craven is 13th in driver points over the second half of the season and has shown the greatest improvement of any driver from the first half to the second half. Craven was 29th in points during the first half and his 13th in the second half represents an improvement of 16 places.

Nemechek is next at plus-14. Casey Atwood and Mike Wallace are plus-13.

The 35-year-old Hampden Academy graduate and 1995 Winston Cup Rookie of the Year has led eight different races including the Old Dominion 500 in which he picked up his first ever win on the Winston Cup circuit.

He has 13 top-20 finishes and seven top 10s.

His average start has been 20th and his average finish 23rd.

He has run 8,868 laps and has won $1,783,944.