Watkins Glen International will hold a special place in the career of Marcos Ambrose after last weekend's success by the popular Australian driver.
Ambrose scored his first career NASCAR win in Saturday's Zippo 200 Nationwide Series race and then capped the weekend with a third-place run in Sunday's Centurion Boats at The Glen Sprint Cup Series event.
The Sunday finish was the first top five for the Wood Brothers Racing No. 21 Ford in three seasons.
"You know, you don't get many chances in life to do something special like this, and today I'm going to look back at very fondly – the whole weekend, to be honest with you," Ambrose said. "I'm just really proud of both my teams, and I hope it can give the Wood Brothers a shot in the arm that they need to really get the momentum to move forward."
Sunday's run was even more impressive in that Ambrose started dead last in the 43-car field.
"It was just a long day out there," said Ambrose. "We used the car up a lot and at the end we had no clutch left, no brakes left and it was tiring.
"Coming through the field is really hard work. We really worked the car hard to get through the field in the first half of the race."
Once Ambrose did get to the lead pack, he found himself battling with experienced Sprint Cup regulars and road racing aces such as Tony Stewart and Juan Pablo Montoya.
"It was great fun running with those guys at the front," he said. "I've really got to thank them for not taking me off there. It would be easy to send me off into the weeds with that rookie stripe on the car."
Ambrose will run both the Nationwide Series and Sprint Cup races this weekend at Michigan as he prepares for a full move to the Cup division in 2009.
But he'll have a few days yet to savor the stellar weekend at The Glen.
"It's a big, bad world out here in NASCAR world, and I'm just pleased that I'm able to have a weekend like this to remember," he said. "When it's all said and done, I'll be able to home back to Tasmania and tell them how good I was at Watkins Glen on one year."
