Winning would have been nice, but it wouldn't have made him
feel any better. Yes, a fourth consectutive top-five finish
was welcome medicine for a team still recovering from an
unaccustomed run of mediocrity. And, in the big picture, moving
up a spot to sixth in points in the Winston Cup standings
was a good thing.None of it though, will bring back Kenny Irwin. And that's why Mark just wanted to go home. A weekend that started with Irwin's death in a July practice crash sucked the enthusiasm for racing out of him.
Mark raced, though he didn't feel like it. What hasn't dimmed is his passion for making things better for he and his fellow competitors.
"I looked directly at the end of the skid marks more than once today," he said, referring to the third-turn wall that Irwin hit after something, possibly a stuck throttle, sent his car skidding out of control.
Mark says it may not have been a stuck throttle that claimed Irwin. He said teammate Jeff Burton once avoided injury after his front brakes locked up in the same spot as Irwin's incident began. Mark doesn't have the answers, he just hopes someone finds them.
Soon.
"Hopefully, we can take something from the two deaths,(but) that's a huge price to pay," he said. "And I don't know what it is (we can learn) for sure. I don't know what we can do.
Mark said he tried to block out Irwin's fate during the race. The wall where Irwin hit had been painted white, but he says he knows where the cracks are in the wall.
This isn't that unusual for Mark, either. Back in 1994, when he was running a Busch Series event at Michigan hours after Ernie Irvan's near fatal practice accident, he said he looked at the spot his close friend's car left on the wall every lap.
He's not afraid of racing, but there is one thing Mark's not ready to experience.
"I don't think any of want to die. Most of us aren't ready for
that yet," he said. "We have things we want to do, things we
want to accomplish and things we need to get done before
that happens. It's right around the corner for some of us
and we just don't know it."Kenny strapped in that race car like he had 10,000 times and went out to make his lap. And, that quick, it was over with. That's how it is, whether it's on the highway going to the grocery store, sometimes in an airplane or any other way that things can happen, a drive-by shooting for that matter. .. These are things that are tragedies in our sport because we're we're not used to having to deal with a loss of life."
That's why losing a race he appeared to have won was, at best, a secondary concern.
Mark led from laps 193 to 204 before pitting under green. That left him with more than enough fuel to go the distance while eventual winner Tony Stewart and runnerup Joe Nemachek needed to stop once more.
Comfortably in third, the race was going to fall right into Mark's lap until Mother Nature deemed otherwise.
"Everybody that could make it we had covered real good, so we were just sitting there cruising," Mark said. "The last set of tires we got on the car, we got the setup right and we were setting the best laps we had run all day."
Mark didn't mind when it was sprinkling. He just didn't want it to intensify to the point where the race was halted.
"My hope was it would continue to sprinkle and it would play out and go all the way," he said. "If it went all the way, it was a no-brainer(we'd win). Some people were gonna be frustrated it it had gone green all the way, but it certainly wouldn't have been us. That's how it goes in racing, somebody is always frustrated but I think you would have seen much greater frustration on (Stewart's Joe Gibbs Racing team) had it gone green."
Five finishes of 14th or worse beginning in California dropped
him from first to ninth in points, throwing a huge roadblock
into his chase for for his first championship. Now 217 points
back in sixth, he's just three points out of fourth."This team couldn't help it when parts broke and tires blew out and all that stuff. That wasn't there fault," he said. "The performance of the team hasn't been the problem. We had back luck five races in a row and sometimes luck just goes that way"
Crew chief Jimmy Fennig says the team has picked up the pace, despite what Mark says of the earlier struggles.
"You've got to work harder," Fennig sad. "we've been working hard (but) Goodyear brought a new tire out, we've got new aerodynamic stuff (to learn). It's tough. It's tough on everybody. But we've got to be strong and we've got to work out of it."
The same way Mark and others have to work through Irwin's death. The first step was simply heading home.
"I'm very glad it's over," Mark said of a weekend he'll remember for all the wrong reasons.
