Cup garage. Mark Martin is beginning to smile. In public.
Trust us, this is a big deal.The reason for the sudden hop in his step? The quickly developing racing career of Matt Martin, Mark's 10-year old son. Matt jumped behind the wheel of a quarter midget at the tender age of six, and now hits the track as the pilot of a Bandolero machine (think go-kart with a fiberglass body).
It's gotten me excited about going back to the track again," says Matt's normally pessimistic dad. "We work on his car together at the shop, we haul it to the track, and we talk about his performance when he's done. My dad and I built our friendship on the road and at the track working on race cars. One day when I was a kid he looked at me and said, ‘Why don't we build you one of those?' That's the moment that changed my life."
With NASCAR's new minimum age requirement of 18, the earliest that Matt can make his Winston Cup debut will be during Speedweeks of 2010. Mark will have just turned 51. Any chance for a father-son duel on the high banks of Daytona?
"Mmm, I don't know about that," Mark says with a grimace. "That's an awful long ways away."
Two big numbers jump out from Mark's stat line from 2001 — zero and twelve. For only the second time since 1988, the man with 32 career Winston Cup wins failed to visit Victory Lane. And for the first time since that same year, Mark did not finish the season in the top 10 in points, coming in 12th.
"I say it all the time, and no one wants to listen," the Arkansas native says in his best "I told you so" voice. "You never know if your last win is going to be your final win. You never know when the luck is going to run out and you're going to stop running up front. Well, it ran out on us a little last year."
Truthfully, Mark's luck hasn't run out, it just hit a dry spell to start the season. Goodyear's new tire combination threw most teams for a loop, but no organization was hit harder than Roush Racing. Just six races into the season, Roush's four cars held down an average points position of 30th, with Mark mired in 27th. By the second half of the season, all four rides recovered and Mark started easing up the charts … but he peaked out at 11th.
"After wrecking at California, I think we finished every
race and finished in the top 10 pretty often," says the
43-year old. "But we were in too deep of a hole to climb out
of."Mark enters 2002 in the same old number six Ford, but with a whole new cast and crew. Gone is Jimmy Fennig, crew chief since late 1996, as is Fennig's entire crew. They haven't gone far, just across the parking lot to Kurt Busch's car. In exchange, Busch's old crew chief, Ben Leslie, brings his staff to Mark's car. (Are you getting all of this?)
The 50-player double-switch was reportedly Mark's idea, with the intent of shaking loose some new ideas from the same old group. For Mark, it's just his fourth different leader on the pit box since joining Roush 15 seasons ago.
"I like Ben a lot," says Mark. "I just think that sometimes you need to change things up sometimes. Hopefully, Jimmy can help Kurt by bringing a different way of doing things over there. Why not? It can't get much worse than the first part of last season."
