If you didn’t know any better and tuned in Saturday night for the Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix you would think that the pilot of the no. 8 car was surely one of NASCAR’s current rock stars. You would be surprised to find out that you were watching a man wheel a race car who’s career began in 1981 before a good number of his fellow competitors were even born.

At the age of 49, throw all of the misnomers out the window that drivers out of their prime can’t react fast enough, lose their abilities or have grown weary at the thought of crashing, thus not running at 100%. No, if you didn’t know any better you might think that was one of NASCAR’s young guns driving the no. 8 car Saturday night. The way that the car was setting into the corner, running down on the bottom through the turns and then lifting hard coming off with the perfect throttle control, there was no lack of ability showing in his driving style. His reaction to hitting his marks were right on and there was no fear of crashing apparent. Put Mark with the best of the best 26 years into his Cup career.

Throughout the up and down journey Mark’s career has endured since leaving Roush he always manages a strong finish and simply gets it done without complaining about the conditions, the team and especially the car. Running part time in 2007, he managed 5 top five finishes and 11 top tens. Running only 24 of 36 races last season he ranked 27^th in points which is something that some of the full-timers couldn’t boast. We are talking about other drivers/teams running full time, good teams with strong sponsors that could not out-rank Martin in points only running 2/3rds of the schedule. That in and of itself is an amazing statistic.

Citing the need for more time off from a grueling Cup schedule and some mentoring obligations, Martin cut back to picking and choosing his races, but is he missing out on his actual ‘prime’ by doing so? Some might argue that the reason he runs so well when he does race is because he’s fresh and rested, but others might say that he’s just that awesome. Not many could argue with the latter.

Mark Martin’s career stats are impressive, but he has been runner up to the championship 4 times for which he has received some criticism over, never having won a championship.

He has finished in the top ten in points 16 seasons in his 26 year career [including 2008] and had an impressive run where he was in the top ten in points 12 years consecutive from 1989-2000. The other notable statistics of his career is 35 victories in Cup and has amassed 240 top five finishes in 704 starts. One out of three times that he straps into a race car he finished in the top five… impressive. 388 times in the same 704 starts he finished in the top ten. If you would like to view all of his career stats in all of the series go to http://www.racing-reference.info/driver?id=martima01

With all of the talk being focused each week on certain drivers abilities and how they will run, Martin sits quietly in the background simply getting it done. Obviously Mark cannot win the championship this season due to his part-time schedule, but feel free to email me if you think that if he ran a full season in 2009 that he wouldn’t be a serious contender to finally win the ever-elusive title of Cup Champion.

I think that he owes it to himself and his long time fans to give it one more shot, then cut back and do what he likes. Two previous reasons for the cutback in his schedule was to assist Matt [his son] with his racing career, which has been put on hold as well as some other mentoring that is no longer an obligation of his.