NEWS & NOTES
WINNING DRIVER: Mark Martin, driver of the No. 5 CARQUEST/Kellogg’s Chevrolet, is a two-time winner in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway. The veteran driver earned his first victory at the track on Aug. 28, 1993, after he started from the pole position and led 67 laps. His second win happened on Aug. 22, 1998, when Martin started fourth and led 190 laps.
NO. 5 IN VICTORY LANE: The No. 5 team won the Cup race at Bristol on March 25, 2007, which marked the first race with NASCAR’s Car of Tomorrow. The win with the Impala SS also marked the 600th victory for Chevrolet and the 200th NASCAR win for Hendrick Motorsports.
MARTIN AT BRISTOL: Martin has earned seven poles at Bristol, the most at any venue for the NASCAR veteran. In his 40 Cup starts at the short track, he has posted two wins, 15 top-five finishes and 21 top-10s.
TWO YEARS AGO: It’s been more than two years since Martin competed at Bristol, which means he has yet to race there in an Impala SS or since the short track’s reconfiguration in 2007. However, Martin got a taste of the speedway that year when he tested a Car of Tomorrow.
Click Here For More NASCAR Photos
DOWN, BUT NOT OUT: Although 34th in the Sprint Cup standings, Martin is ranked 13th in driver rating at 86.4 and sits just 189 points outside of the coveted top 12. Alan Kulwicki famously overcame a 278-point deficit in the final six events to win the 1992 Cup championship, and Jimmie Johnson more recently made up a 156-point margin in five late-season races en route to the 2006 title. Although is has more competitors to pass than Kulwicki or Johnson, the No. 5 team has 22 races remaining before the cutoff for the 2009 Chase for the Sprint Cup.
CHASSIS 500: The 500th chassis built by Hendrick Motorsports will return to the track this weekend at Bristol with Martin behind the wheel. The chassis—Hendrick Motorsports No. 5-500—was raced four times last season: at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in May, Michigan International Speedway in June, Chicagoland Speedway in July and Kansas Speedway in September.
HENDRICK AT BRISTOL: Hendrick Motorsports, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary this season, has gone 16 straight races with at least one top-10 finish at Bristol, a streak that dates back to Aug. 26, 2000. At the time, the organization was a three-car team with Jeff Gordon, Terry Labonte and Jerry Nadeau. Since 1986, when Hendrick became a multi-car team, the organization has recorded a top-10 finish in all but five of the 46 Bristol races. Hendrick Motorsports drivers have accounted for eight wins, 37 top-five finishes and 67 top-10s there.
QUOTES
MARK MARTIN, DRIVER, NO. 5 CARQUEST/KELLOGG’S CHEVROLET (ON NOT RACING AT BRISTOL IN TWO YEARS.): “I have tested there, and I raced the truck on the new configuration once. I don’t mean to be overly confident, but it’s just a racetrack. I’m not concerned at all about neither having raced a COT there or not having a ton of experience. It’s just a racetrack. I don’t think it will be any problem for us.”
MARTIN (ON HIS APPROACH IN HIS FIRST BRISTOL RACE IN AN IMPALA SS.): “Alan (Gustafson, crew chief) and I have talked about it, and Alan’s won there with the COT. He has a really good understanding of what we need for setup stuff, and he’s been on the money everywhere else. It’s just another track to us. I’m certainly not concerned. Everywhere I’ve ever raced, I went there for the first time sometime. This is not like my first time there anyway.”
MARTIN (ON WHAT IT TAKES TO WIN AT BRISTOL.): “Bristol is a tough one to win because there are so many factors that come into it. Track position is major there, as it is everywhere anymore. Pit strategy is additionally important there. I used to always answer that question saying a good-handling race car, but, boy, I tell you it takes a lot more than that any more to pull one of these things off, and Bristol is a little bit more complex than some other places because it takes awhile to move your way through the field or pass cars.”
Click Here For More NASCAR Photos
MARTIN (ON IF BRISTOL IS LIKE TALLADEGA (ALA.) SUPERSPEDWAY, WHERE ‘ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.’): “I feel you have a lot more control over your destiny at Bristol than you do at Talladega. The problem is, the unpredictability of it is you don’t know when the cautions are going to be. You can do a strategy that on one hand can turn out to be brilliant and then the cautions change that to not being such a good strategy. That makes it really tough. There’s a lot that plays into it. Some of the factors you can’t control and you have to make the best of the situation. The good thing about what I’ve seen the last several races as a spectator is it seems like they’ve stopped wrecking so much. Before they reconfigured the racetrack, the wrecks were getting out of hand so it seems a lot better now.”
| 
|