Or is it?
Mark will tell you there's room for improvement.
"Everybody here is good," the Roush Racing star said,
"but there are a lot of people out there in the world
that are better than a lot of the guys that are here, but
they will never get a chance."Mark wants to help give them just such a chance.
He's working on a project - details of which he is not ready to divulge - that he hopes will help teenagers with legitimate racing potential make the jump from local dirt tracks to stock-car racing's highest level. Mark wants to provide an assist to would-be stars who lack the proper resources - especially financial.
He also has in mind youngsters who want to try their hand at auto racing but have no way to do so.
"I just think there are some teenage kids out there who are good enough to do this but will never have the opportunity unless somebody makes that opportunity for them," he said.
"I want to feel the feeling of what it's like to help somebody you know for a fact would never have had the opportunity. Most of these kids' parents aren't multimillionaires, so how are they supposed to get here?"
To get noticed these days, one needs a lot more than driving acumen, even at the local dirt track. Without the right equipment and without a decent sponsor, chances of making it big are slim.
"When I started racing, my trailer was a set of house-trailer axles under a piece of steel that you hauled the car on," Mark said. "Now when you start racing, you need a tractor-trailer. I couldn't have done that, and I don't see how anybody else can, either.
"By the time kids are old enough to have a driver's license, I want to be able to give them an opportunity to drive something besides a go-kart."
Fellow driver Tony Stewart likes Mark's concept.
"There's hundreds of thousands of race-car drivers across the country, and there's 55 of us that show up for a Cup weekend," last year's rookie star said.
"We've all had help getting to where we're at. We've all had to work hard, but we've also had some breaks, and not everybody gets those breaks. I applaud what Mark's doing. He's got a very unselfish attitude."
Maybe, but Mark's motives aren't entirely altruistic. The stronger the field, the stronger his sense of satisfaction.
"Like, if I could fix it where Jeff Gordon never made it to NASCAR, then I could probably win more, but I wouldn't try to do that," Mark said. "I'd certainly rather see deserving drivers than non-deserving drivers in this series."
