Martin loves racing at Pocono despite not yet posting a win there
Mark Martin has talked for much of the NASCAR Sprint Cup season about how much it would mean to win a race for his No. 8 Dale Earnhardt Inc. team. Pocono Raceway, site of Sunday’s Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500, might be just the place to make it happen.
Martin has six second-place finishes and three poles in 43 Pocono starts over the course of his lengthy career. The veteran driver has posted 30 top-10 finishes at the 2.5-mile track.
It seems that a win is all that has eluded him at Pocono.
“I have never won at Pocono, but it's still one of my favorite tracks that we go to,”
said Martin, whose last victory came in 2005 in his next-to-last season with the team now known as Roush Fenway Racing. “It really goes to show that you don't have to win somewhere to love it. I've won at Martinsville a couple of times and don't like the place at all. Now we have had some good runs there over the years.”
Martin, who is running a partial schedule with DEI this season, didn’t run as well as he had hoped at Pocono when the series last raced there in June. After qualifying a strong third, the Batesville, Ark., native fought an ill-handling car to a 10th-place finish.
Martin hopes to change that this time around.
“We had a good car there in June, and we qualified well but didn't race quite as well,”
he said. “Our challenge this weekend will be to make the car better for the race.”
Martin also hopes to run better than he did in last weekend’s Allstate 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where he started second but finished 11th after tires issues forced him to make several unscheduled pit stops.
“We all had a tough race last week at Indy, but everyone hung in there and did the best they could,”
Martin said. “We had trouble early, and it was a bad situation all around, but [crew chief] Tony Gibson and all of the guys on this No. 8 team dug in and fought to the end."
“We made the best of a bad situation. Hopefully, this weekend we'll have a lot better go of it on the track."
