September 9, 2010
By Doug Demmons
Mark Martin says he’s no champion.
“When I look back on it, I've been very, very fortunate to have been incredibly successful at doing what I have passion for and love,” Martin said Tuesday. “And I'm no champion. I'm just lucky I got to win a pile of races. I'm no champion.”
He’s completely wrong, of course. But technically, he’s correct.
He has won 40 Sprint Cup races in 783 starts since 1981 but never the championship.
He’s won 48 Nationwide Series races since 1982 in 231 starts, but never a championship.
He even has seven Truck Series wins and 13 IROC wins. But aside from his four ASA championships, he has no titles.
And this year is going to be another without a championship, made all the more frustrating by how close he came to winning it all in 2009 in his first year with Hendrick Motorsports.
Expectations were high to start the year after a five-win season in 2009 and finishing second to Jimmie Johnson in the standings.
He won the pole for this year’s Daytona 500. But there have been no wins and no finishes better than fourth.
When crunch time came this summer and he needed good finishes to get into the Chase the No. 5 team swooned, not even breaking into the top 20 for the last three races. Since the Coke 600 he has just one top 10 finish.
So what happened? How did the wheels come off?
“Well, you know, I don't really know,” Martin said laughing. “I just know it happens. I've seen it happen before. But I don't really know.”
Same driver. Same crew chief. Different reults.
“Didn't really see this coming for the 5 car. And I just know that it happens, that things change and competition,” he said. “The target is a moving target. It always has been and always will be. And we were hitting the bull's eye last year. And we haven't found the bull's eye this year.”
Years ago that would have bothered him, he acknowledged. Not so much today.
“I think that I'm better equipped to handle this than ever before, based on the experiences I've had,” he said. “I'm not fully matured yet. But I have matured some, from 15 years ago, and certainly would have handled things differently if this was 15 years ago and would have let it impact the way I interacted with the people that I worked with and my family as well.”
So now the team needs to use the remaining 11 races to get the wheels back on the wagon and turn things around for what might very well be Martin’s last shot at the Cup title -- his final year at Hendrick before Kasey Kahne moves in.
But if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Even the championships that got away from him in previous years don’t matter, he said.
“When I look back on it now, it wouldn't have changed my life had I won it in 1990,” he said. “It wouldn't change my life any. I don't think I'd be a different person. I don't think I'd have a different ride. I don't think I'd have more sponsors or anything else.”
He’s a driver who has come to terms with the possibility that he may have to settle for less than his dream, that he may never win a championship.
“I haven't earned the right to be in that category or to stand beside those guys,” he said of other champions. “But at the same time I'm proud that I made them work for it and I saw them finish behind me many a time. And that I can be proud of. And I think that there's a measure to every human being. There's different ways you measure success.”
In that statement, Martin is correct, but for the wrong reasons.
There are, indeed, many measures of success. The older we get the more we realize that we will not be failures if we don’t become millionaires or rock stars, that our efforts have not been wasting because we reached for the brass ring and missed.
Because at least we reached for it.
Martin has done that and more. He is the most respected driver in the garage, a driver who won five races at an age when men are supposed to be having colonoscopies and signing up for AARP.
He doesn’t have a championship trophy, but Mark Martin is every bit a champion.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
Follow Doug on Twitter: @dougdemmons
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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