Meanwhile, Mark lounged on his couch and waited for the brief
vacation to end and the vroom to resume. He enjoyed the
quality time with his wife, Arlene, and 8-year-old son,
Matt. But the lure of high speeds and 720 horsepower
remained."I'm not easily distracted," Mark said. "I’m interested in so very little. I wish I had other interests, but it’s hard for anything to catch my attention outside those cars. People don’t realize when I’m not in that race car, I’m still racing. With all the time I’ve spent in the car, my brain is like a computer. I think like that all the time."
That single-minded devotion, coupled with 32 Cup victories and 46 Busch Grand National wins, has garnered Mark a reputation as one of the sport’s most driven behind the wheel. Since he began wheeling Late Models as a 14-year-old in Arkansas in the early 1970s, Mark’s life has revolved around race cars. While others swap stories and tell jokes during breaks in the Winston Cup garage, Mark frequently is spotted dispensing advice on setups and speed to fellow competitors.
Despite his overwhelming passion for stock cars, Mark has been candid the past few seasons about pulling back the reins on his career. His Winston Cup contract with Roush Racing extends through the 2005 season.
He will be 47 in 2006. Several top stars have competed well past that age, but Mark doesn’t envision himself staying in the No. 6 Ford.
He openly admits racing isn’t as enjoyable now, even though it still dominates his life -- as it has for more than 2½ decades.
"Expectations are the real killer," Mark said. "The most fun I had in racing was when I didn't know I could outrun Richard Petty."
That was before he had a family. Later, Arlene and Matt often accompanied Mark to races, but their attendance has declined recently with Matt in school and the demands on his dad having mushroomed.
"It’s gotten tougher on me every year when you have a child who’s started school," Mark said. "Sometimes, we hardly ever see each other."
The solution has been to scale back. The 2000 season was his final in the Busch series.
"This is my last year in Busch for a lot of reasons," Mark said. "One of the most glaring is it takes a much bigger piece out of you to do the same job as five or 10 years ago. There’s not enough left of you to do the same thing required. I used to have people ask me, ‘How do you come in here Friday morning, qualify both cars and then race on Saturday and Sunday?’ I’d say, ‘What? There’s nothing to it.’ There’s a lot more to it now. You’ve got about a full plate with one car more than it used to be."
Mark fondly recalls the days when he walked at a slow pace through the NASCAR garage between his Winston Cup and Busch cars. But a full budget for running the Busch series now matches the amount it cost to complete a season in Winston Cup 10 years ago. Increased commitments to sponsors and the media have made leisurely strolls impossible.
The pressure of Winston Cup still remains fundamentally different from the Busch series. Mark finished eighth in Cup points this season, after hopes of winning his first title dissipated in a June-July swoon. For Mark, who has finished runner-up in the standings three times, the frustration has become commonplace.
"Something happens and you lose five points in a [Winston Cup] race, you grouse for a week," he said. "That could cost you a championship. You don’t just walk away and say, ‘Oh, that was a bad day!’ . . . Each race means so much. It’s really sucked the fun out of it because there’s so much riding on it. "
"In the Busch series, you have a bad race and you can shrug it off. It’s harder to do that in Winston Cup. I don’t see anyone in the Cup garage with that attitude."
Perhaps no one personifies the philosophy more than Mark, and even though the process sometimes consumes him, he wouldn’t change a thing.
"Everyone I know who’s been successful in this business has devoted every minute of their life to it from the time they were a teen-ager," he said. "This is the American dream. It’s what every kid wants to do."
