Contending for a championship is not what Mark Martin had in mind when the 2013 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season dawned. The 40-time Sprint Cup race winner last ran a full season in 2011 and has since set his championship aspirations aside. Nonetheless, Martin could very well find himself battling for a title during the final 10 races of the season depending on how Saturday night’s Federated Auto Parts 400 at Richmond (Va.) International Raceway unfolds.
Martin, driving in place of the injured Tony Stewart, will make just his third start behind the wheel of the No. 14 Bass Pro Shops/Mobil 1 Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR) when cars hit the track on Friday for practice and qualifying at the .75-mile oval. While Martin is not in a position to make the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, the team he’s driving for is.
The owner championship follows the same point system used to determine the winner of the 12-driver Chase. Like the driver points in the Chase, the owner points are reset following round No. 26 at Richmond, with only the top-10 in owner points and two wild cards in contention for the owner championship.
By virtue of their win June 2 at Dover (Del.) International Speedway, the No. 14 Bass Pro Shops/Mobil 1 team is very much in the hunt for one of the two wild-card spots.
The team currently sits 15th in the owner standings with 696 points, only 23 points behind the 10th-place No. 78 team of Furniture Row Racing. With seven teams already locked in, up to 12 different teams are vying for one of the remaining five spots that will make up the field of teams competing for the owner championship.
While it is a high pressure situation, the No. 14 team has a history of rising to the occasion. In both 2011 and 2012 the No. 14 team entered the last race before the Chase with its position in the championship battle uncertain. At this race one year ago, the team traveled to Richmond 10th in points before turning in a fourth-place effort to lock down their fourth straight Chase appearance. One year earlier, the team not only parlayed a seventh-place finish at Richmond into a Chase berth, but they used it as a springboard for scoring the 2011 Sprint Cup title.
Matching the No. 14 team’s Chase familiarity is Martin’s experience at Richmond. Since competing as a rookie in 1981, Martin has made 55 Sprint Cup starts at Richmond, earning one win (February 1990), five poles, 18 top-fives and 30 top-10s. He’s led a total of 449 laps and completed a whopping 21,203 of the 21,859 laps run for a lap completion rate of 97 percent.
Martin may not have envisioned competing for a championship in February, but if both driver and team compete at a level at which they’re accustomed to in September, October and November, then championship aspirations may very well become reality.
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