Mark Martin says setup is key to running well at Homestead-Miami Speedway

By SceneDaily Staff

Friday, November 20, 2009

Hendrick Motorsports' Mark Martin has four top-five and five top-10 finishes in nine NASCAR Sprint Cup starts at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

David Griffin
NASCAR Scene

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CORAL GABLES, Fla. – Hendrick Motorsports’ Mark Martin will try something new in his career this weekend. He’ll compete in NASCAR’s new-model Sprint Cup car at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Over the course of his 27-year career, Martin has raced under a variety of conditions and adapted to a slate of different cars, so this weekend shouldn’t present any particular issues for the driver.

Martin has, after all, competed in the new-model car at other 1.5-mile tracks this season. And he has competed at Homestead, where he has five top-10 finishes, four of them top-fives, in nine races for an average finish of 12.0.

Martin, who enters this weekend’s Ford 400 second in the standings, 108 points behind teammate and points leader Jimmie Johnson, doesn’t expect to have any issues.

“I’m real excited about it,” he said Thursday during a news conference for the two championship contenders. “I have a lot of confidence in our mile-and-a-half setup logic and what we’ve been running for setups at other mile-and-a-half race tracks. I have every bit of confidence that that same logic will work here and will be very surprised if it doesn’t work out well for us with the same kind of things that we’ve been using at the other race tracks.”

While he says that his teammates, Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., haven’t always been pleased with their cars at the track in years past, he doesn’t expect to have any issues this weekend.

“Even though the other Hendrick cars have not been pleased in the past with their performance here,” Martin said, “I think that ours will be there with the same logic that we’ve been using at the other tracks.”