Tuesday, January 27, 2009

New (Old) Kid On The Block

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As always, there will be plenty of fascinating stories in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series this year, even if many of them are of the train-wreck variety, thanks to the prevailing economic conditions.

To me, though, one of the most compelling will what Mark Martin is able to accomplish at Hendrick Motorsports. Martin, of course, was supposed to retire after the 2005 season, but NASCAR’s version of Benjamin Button seems to be getting younger, not older. Even if he remains as curious and enigmatic as ever. How many former Arkansas dirt-track racers, after all, are big fans of the rapper 50 Cent?

While much has been made over the years that Martin is the greatest driver to never win a Sprint Cup title, to me that sort of misses the point. Even though he’s now 50 years old, Martin can still bring his A game. He races hard, he races clean and this year, he’ll shock some people with what he can do.

Recall that not only did he come within inches of winning the 2007 Daytona 500, but he followed that up with finishes of fifth at California and Las Vegas, 10th at Atlanta and third at Texas driving for a Ginn Racing squad that didn’t have a fraction of the resources that the Hendricks and Roushes had.

If you talk to the guys at Hendrick they are thrilled to have Martin on board for a full season in ’09. “If you can't get along with Mark Martin, you can't get along with anybody,” says team owner Rick Hendrick. “He is such a neat person, and gracious and respectful of all these other guys. He fits like a glove. He came into our trailer in Phoenix and has been sharing stuff with our guys. He is going to make us all better.”

“The amount of respect that everybody in the series has for him is really the one thing that sticks out about Mark,” adds Dale Earnhardt Jr. “Everybody likes Mark and everybody thinks a lot of him. To me he is a role model in that aspect. … He's going to be fast and he's going to be hard to beat.”

Jeff Gordon, who waged some titanic championship battles with Martin in the late ‘90s, is fired up, too. “Mark is one hot commodity, even at 50 years old,” says Gordon. “He's extremely talented, very committed, and very capable of winning races and a championship.”

Here’s the bottom line: Martin is joining a team that has a four-time Sprint Cup champion in Gordon, a three-time defending Cup champion in Jimmie Johnson and an excellent driver in Earnhardt.

If somehow Martin manages to capture a championship this year, beating those three established superstars on his own team, plus Carl Edwards, Kyle Busch, Greg Biffle and the rest of the power hitters in NASCAR, it would be a bigger upset than the Arizona Cardinals winning the Super Bowl.

It would also be the single best story in NASCAR since the late Alan Kulwicki’s improbable title run in 1992.

Race fans regularly ask me who my favorite driver is or who I root for. I always tell them the same thing: I don’t have a favorite driver. What I root for is a great story, a compelling, dramatic finish or an improbable outcome to a race or a championship. For sure, seeing Mark Martin win it all this year would be an epic story, one for the ages.

And believe me, it would be a story that would write itself.

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