The Protection One 400

Mark earned his 12th top-10 finish of the season Sunday with a ninth Mark Martin

place finish at Lowe's Motor Speedway in the UAW-GM Quality 500. Mark started the Viagra® Taurus from the eighth position and was very pleased with the car throughout most of the race.

The car was tight early in the race so the crew decided to make slight air pressure and wedge adjustments during the first pit stop on lap 23. Mark earned one spot in the pits with a 14.6-second stop and returned to the race in 11th place. The adjustments seemed to help and Mark moved back up to eighth place by the next caution 22 laps later. Another 14-second pit stop sent Mark out in fourth place and once the race resumed, he quickly moved up to third place.

By lap 110, Mark had slipped to fifth as he told crew chief, Jimmy Fennig, the car developed a push when he went through the middle of turns three and four. Fennig and Mark decided to make another wedge adjustment on lap 114 and Mark returned to third place after another 14-second pit stop by the Viagra® team. Mark ran in third place for the next 20 laps and told the team he had a really good engine under the car. The handling was still a bit off so the crew made another wedge adjustment and had their fourth consecutive 14-second pit stop of the race. Mark returned to the race in seventh place when the race resumed on lap 146 since some of the cars ahead of him only took two tires.

By the halfway point of the race, the car was too tight again. Another caution came out on lap 169, so Mark pitted to have more wedge removed from the car. A problem with the threading on one of the studs on the left-front wheel slowed the team's stop and Mark came out of the pits in 13th place. He struggled with the handling during this run and it was the only run of the day when he was not pleased with the car. He fell back as far as 18th place and told the team to put the wedge back in the car on the next stop and make another air pressure adjustment. The team did just that on lap 229 and the 15-second stop sent him back out in 11th place.

The car was still too tight and Mark said the car needed to turn better. They made a small air pressure adjustment for the final pit stop on lap 296 during the only green flag pit cycle of the day. The adjustments seemed to work since Mark moved up to ninth place nine laps later.

With 29 laps to go, Mark was gaining on the eighth place car of Kevin Harvick. He had a sizable lead over Mark, but the Viagra® Taurus was gaining nearly two-tenths of a second every lap and was running about the same lap times as the leader, Sterling Marlin. The race ended before Mark could catch Harvick, which gave Mark a ninth place finish. The strong finish moved him up to 11th place in the Winston Cup point standings. He now trails 10th place, held by his Roush teammate Jeff Burton, by only 56 points.

"We hung in there pretty good today," Mark said. "We had one segment that we got way behind on, unfortunately, and we made our way back to ninth. We weren't strong enough to go further than that with the amount of time we had, but we had a car that was capable of finishing better than that if we had a flawless day. We had everything but a flawless day. The Viagra® team did great on pit road today and it was a good result."

Next weekend the Winston Cup teams return to Marksville Speedway in Marksville, Va., for the Old Dominion 500.