Mark Martin highlights Hendrick Motorsports team's togetherness for runnerup season

By SceneDaily Staff

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Mark Martin credits his Hendrick Motorsports team and their ability to work through setbacks together with his runnerup finish in the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup standings. (LaDon George / NASCAR Scene)

Mark Martin credits his Hendrick Motorsports team and its ability to work through setbacks together with his runnerup finish in the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup standings.

LaDon George
NASCAR Scene

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Hendrick Motorsports' Mark Martin never has been the kind of guy trying to grab credit for accomplishments. So it's really no surprise that he involves his entire team when talking about his NASCAR Sprint Cup success this season.

While Martin's year ended on a high note, it didn't start out that way.

Martin and his team had a top finish of 16th in the opening trio of races, a stretch marked by three finishes of 31st or worse. After that, though, Martin and his team rallied with four consecutive top-10 finishes that culminated in the win at Phoenix.

Things remained a bit inconsistent through the next stretch, but by August the group had become a weekly contender for wins and top-five finishes. Martin didn't lock up his berth in the Chase For The Sprint Cup until the 26th race at Richmond, but he and his Alan Gustafson-led team hit their stride from that point on. Despite flipping late at Talladega Superspeedway, Martin led the standings for four weeks and was never worse than second in the standings in the Chase.

He finished the year second in points with five victories, his first multiwin season since 1999 with what is now Roush Fenway Racing.

Not bad for a first-year partnership of driver and crew.

The veteran experience of Martin, 50, and the respect his team held for him helped them through that initial stage of the season.

So too, says Martin, did the fact that they never cast blame on one another. Instead, they took their setbacks and their successes with equal grace and shared responsibility.

"We support each other 100 percent,” he says of his team. “That's a mature team, and I, through all the years, have some maturity as a driver, and whenever things turn bad for either one of us we're there for each other. Never a group that would point fingers at one another. We're all in it together."

And that helped the team both survive and rally from that opening stretch.

Martin, a 20-plus year veteran of Cup racing, has certainly seen the ups and downs the sport can offer. After two seasons of racing on a part-time basis, he returned to full-time competition with one of the most powerful organizations in sports.

He united forces with Gustafson, a childhood fan of Martin’s and crew chief who had worked with Kyle Busch and Casey Mears within the Hendrick organization.

They believed in their ability to build a top-tier team. So the opening run didn’t throw them off their game.

And even though the finishes weren’t what they had hoped, there were bright spots in that opening segment of the season.

“Even when we had trouble they didn’t get down,” Martin said. “Even at those events we would be fastest in practice at times and stuff like that and when you would see our car go to the top of the scoring monitor, those guys would just beam. I mean, they would just light up. And that really was cool.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of the season was that team unity, that belief in one another.

Gustafson said that when he was a young race fan, he viewed Martin as a “man’s man” and tried to emulate that work ethic he witnessed.

“He always worked very hard for what he got, and if he fell short, he was the first guy to stand up and take the blame, and he would not point the finger and get into controversy,” Gustafson says. “He'd go back and work harder and come back that much better.”

That’s the kind of dedication Gustafson seems to have created within his team as well.

It’s a mindset that the entire group adopted this season.

When the year ended, Martin said it was the first time in a while that he can remember not being glad that the season was over.

After his first year at Hendrick, he appeared both enamored of the organization’s strength – and unwilling to take credit for helping an already successful team and crew chief have its best showing.

“To me, what I really brought to that race team was only one thing and that was confidence and their mindset and it was just my goal to help them achieve the kind of success that they were capable of and I think we did real well in that area,” Martin said.

Gustafson sees it as much more than that.

He says that sometimes when you meet or work with people that you grew up thinking well of, it doesn’t work out all that well.

That wasn’t the case with Martin.

“I think I'm a bigger Mark Martin fan today than I was before I knew him, and I have more respect for him today than I did then,” Gustafson said. “That's a really neat thing.”