HAMPTON, Ga. — Tony Stewart will gladly take some credit if Sunday’s race at Atlanta Motor Speedway is free of tire troubles.

The outspoken two-time champion assailed Goodyear following the March race here, calling the tiremaker’s product “the most pathetic racing tire I’ve ever been on in my professional career.” Several other drivers also griped about the hard compound, which quickly lost grip and sucked all the excitement from the race, but no one was as vicious as Stewart.

It cast a negative light on Goodyear, which returned to Atlanta to test new tires twice before this weekend’s event. Stewart said Friday he was pleased with the current tire selection, and doesn’t regret the verbal assault that may have spurred the change.

“If nobody said anything, nothing would’ve got done,” he said. “All I did was speak from the driver’s standpoint and spoke the truth. It got something done, didn’t it? If it makes it safer for us and makes us all more comfortable as drivers out there, isn’t that — at the end of the day — what’s going to put on a better show for everybody?”

KENTUCKY UPDATE: Bruton Smith has not given up his fight to secure a Sprint Cup race for Kentucky Speedway, and said Friday he wants that track added to the NASCAR schedule in 2010.

Smith, chairman of Speedway Motorsports Inc., entered a purchase agreement for Kentucky in May and is expected to close on the track in December.

One holdup to getting a race at Kentucky is a pending antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR by the original track ownership group, which battled for years for a date. Smith said Friday NASCAR has indicated it won’t give Kentucky a Cup race until the lawsuit goes away.

The lawsuit currently is in U.S. Appeals Court in Cincinnati, and former track owner Jerry Carroll has given no indication he’ll drop the suit.

“He’s tried like the dickens to get it (settled) but we have not been able to be successful on that,” Smith said. “We will have a Cup race there in 2010.”

LOGANO’S LUCK: NASCAR phenom Joey Logano has been itching to run his first race in a Joe Gibbs Racing car, but weather keeps getting in his way.

Logano is entered in a fourth JGR car at Atlanta Motor Speedway, but awoke to a steady rain Friday that washed out qualifying. Logano had to qualify the No. 02 on speed to make Sunday’s field, and the canceled session sent Logano home.

“It’s a bummer,” Logano said. “I heard there’s a drought down here, though, so I guess it’s good for them. I just wish it was a different day than today. It’s something you can’t control, so you can’t get too upset about it. If it’s something I did wrong, I would be more upset about it. It is what it is.”

Logano was entered in last month’s race at Richmond International Raceway, but missed the event when qualifying was rained out.

“We got to practice it, and we were a top-five car,” Logano said. “That was a big confidence-booster there to know you can be a top-five car.”

But he’s had little to be excited about since. Logano made two starts for Hall of Fame Racing, which has a technical alliance with JGR, but neither race was productive. He was 32nd at New Hampshire, 39th at Kansas, and JGR officials decided to pull him from any more events in that car.

“When it doesn’t work out, it just doesn’t work out,” Logano said. “We tried hard, we gave it our best effort, and we did everything we could do to make it work. We just had to rethink what we were doing. It was different than what I was used to driving, after doing a lot of testing with the Gibbs guys.

“You kind of have to start over with what you want with the race car and what they want. It wasn’t jelling completely, the way we needed it to be.”