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After leading a race-high 55 laps in Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup race, Mark and the No. 8 team were forced
to battle back from an early pit-road mishap. Mark's late charge of picking up six positions in the final
two laps gave him an eighth-place finish in the Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania
500 at Pocono Raceway.“We had a rocket ship out there today,” said Mark. “Guys were just waving me by, because they knew they didn’t have anything for this Steak-Umm Chevrolet. The car would really take off on new tires and it just wouldn’t look back." “We had a little problem in the pits,” added Mark. “But these guys have been the best on pit road all season, and we are not going to concentrate on what we didn’t do today. I’d rather concentrate on what we did do, and that’s battle back. We never gave up, hung in there and got a solid finish.” Mark and his No. 8 Steak-Umm Chevrolet Impala SS were the class of the field early on. The veteran started outside of the front row and needed only one corner to take over the race lead from Jimmie Johnson. He would go on to drive away from the field, leading the first 20 laps, while building as much as a 13-second lead on the competition. The team took four tires on its first stop, while a few teams opted for two. Mark restarted in sixth, but wasted little time flexing his muscle, needing only a dozen laps to retake the lead on Lap 36 of 200. Mark was still leading when he came down pit road for four new tires and fuel after a caution on Lap 65. A slow pit stop put Mark back out in seventh place when green-flag racing resumed. With Mark running in sixth place after the day’s fifth caution, the team again struggled on the right front in the pits and Mark lost valuable position as he was relegated to 17th-place when the race went green. The scenario forced Mark and Tony Gibson to implement an alternative pit strategy when the sixth caution was issued for rain on Lap 127. The move placed Mark back inside the top-five, but put him on a different pit cycle than the majority of the field. Mark and the No. 8 Dale Earnhardt Inc. team were running in second position and closing in on the lead with only 13 laps remaining, but without a caution they were forced to pit alone on lap 187. To make matters worse, Mark’s Chevrolet ran out of fuel coming into the pits and the veteran returned to the field in 20th position after taking right-side tires and fuel under green. Mark was still back in 15th position with only eight laps to go, but he was able to overtake seven more positions in the remaining laps as several cars began to run out of fuel. The finish was Mark’s seventh top-10 of the season and his record extending 31st top-10 at Pocono Raceway. The strong run moved the No. 8 DEI team to 15th in the Sprint Cup owner points. Rookie Aric Almirola will take over the wheel of the No. 8 Chevy next weekend at Watkins Glen International, with Mark rejoining the team the following week in Michigan. |
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