No. 9 Team ASE Toyota driver Ted Musgrave. (David M. Vaughn Photo)

Ted Musgrave scored his second top-five finish of the 2007 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season by driving the Germain Racing No. 9 Team ASE Toyota to a fifth-place finish in Saturday's Kroger 250 at the Martinsville Speedway. In a race slowed by 15 caution periods, Musgrave managed to keep his nose clean on the track and parlayed strong pit strategy by crew chief Rick Gay on his way to his fourth consecutive top-10 finish to open the season.

"We are always hoping to win races, but if you can't do that top fives are the secondary goal," Musgrave said. "You look at the points system and that's what you have to do to score points. We were fairly strong here today, but we were a little off. We learned a lot that we can come back with and use here in the fall. If you look around here there are a lot of trucks that are torn up and they had good runs tossed down the drain. Our day was nothing like that. We had a pretty good day. We pitted once and that was we needed to do to stay out there in the points."

While Musgrave was able to stay out of trouble, that doesn't mean he came through the race totally unscathed.

"We have some short track battle scars on it," Musgrave said. "It's better than some of them out there though. There was a lot of contact out there, mainly from the lapped trucks. If you were racing for position it wasn't that bad, but on the restarts the lapped trucks trying - well, I don't know what they were doing to tell you the truth, but it sure made it interesting every time they waved the green flag. There were people getting knocked out of the groove all over the place. Maybe it's because we haven't had a lot of racing lately and they wanted to get it all out of their system."

Musgrave and the Germain Racing team have a lot of momentum heading into the next series race at Kansas Speedway in April 28.

"From everything I've seen, we should be pretty good as we start getting on to the mile and a half's like Kansas," Musgrave said. "The team is pretty stable right now. When we go to the track, we unload well and we race good and that builds a strong foundation."

Musgrave stays fifth in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship standings, 145 points behind leader Mike Skinner and just one point behind fourth-place driver Ron Hornaday.

Next up for Musgrave and the Germain Racing No. 9 Team ASE Toyota is the O'Reilly 250 at the Kansas Speedway.