Kmart 400 - 2000

What is happening to Mark?

"I don't know what's wrong and neither does anybody else," Mark said Sunday after finishing 40th in the Kmart 400 at Michigan Speedway. "We've just been off this week."

Mark blows up at Dover

This week? Since his win at the Goody's 500 on April 9 at Martinsville Speedway, Mark has finished just once in the top 10 (a sixth-place finish the following week in the DieHard 500 at Talladega). Finishes of 14th (NAPA Auto Parts 500), 32nd (Pontiac Excitement 400), 12th (Coca-Cola 600) and 36th (MBNA Platinum 400) has seen the normally rock solid Jack Roush driver slip from chasing Bobby Labonte for the Winston Cup series lead to ninth place in the standings after Sunday's finish.

"This is a place where we always run good," Mark said of Michigan Speedway. "I've raced here for 12 years, twice a year, and have never run bad, but we have not run anywhere even close to good since we've been here. We've tried a lot of things and today is almost over with, thank goodness."

But the season isn't even halfway complete and it looks like Mark, one of Winston Cup's best drivers to have never won the series championship, already may have to start thinking about next year.

The talk at the beginning of the season was how Dale Jarrett had a good shot at repeating as Cup champion. But after opening the defense of his 1999 title by winning the Daytona 500, Jarrett struggled to find consistency. It was Martin who had picked up the Ford banner and was chasing Labonte's No. 18 Pontiac, which had six top-10 finishes over the season's first eight events. And when Mark won at Martinsville, a place that has been historically hard on him, it appeared he was not just physically fit from his injury plagued 1999 campaign but mentally prepared to win his first Cup title.

Jarrett's recent string of finishes in the top five over his past five races, including a fourth in the Kmart 400, has elevated the defending Winston Cup champion to fourth in the points standings and has left Mark scratching his head at ninth.

"That was a pretty good finish for us," Jarrett said. "We would have liked to done better, but we'll take that. Tony (Stewart) had the best car. He and Bobby (Labonte) had the best cars, so we'll take what we got here."

"We're not in a position to make any huge gains right now with the way things are," Mark says.

What Mark got at Michigan was more frustration from his No. 6 Valvoline Ford, which has gone sour and has taken Mark's disposition with it.

Try as they might at Michigan, Mark and the Roush team just couldn't get going fast. At Dover Downs a week earlier, the engine let go.

"I suspect that it dropped a head off a valve and that the valve jingled in there and broke the piston and the piston came through the side of the block," Roush said. Another valve problem caused Mark to lose power at Charlotte, where he managed that 12th-place finish. It seems Mark has lost all the momentum he had garnished by winning at Martinsville.

"Momentum can be broke by a dollar part," Mark said after that. A few thousand dollars in broken engines and ruined valve trains later, it's proving to be prophetic.

Dollar parts or not, it's always something that has made the Arkansan the poster boy for hard-luck driving and kept Mark from winning that title. Perhaps one extra win or a top-five finish may have changed one of his three runner-up finishes (1990, '94 and '98) to a No. 1. Instead, it was wait until next year.

"The championship will certainly be determined more by who has the least amount of trouble on the race track than by performance, because there are so many great performing teams and drivers out there," said Mark, a religious man who still knows that winning a race or a series title also involves something serendipitous.

"What is going to determine the real championship contenders are going to be the guys that are basically lucky enough to not have misfortune or have the least amount of misfortunes."

Right now, that's not Mark. If he can't exorcise those garage gremlins soon, he'll have to continue to borrow binoculars to see the points leaders for the rest of the season.

At least he's in good company. Jeff Gordon is 66 points back of Mark in 10th.


Congratulations, Tony Stewart, for the win at the 2000 NASCAR Winston Cup Kmart 400 in Brooklyn Michigan.