Sunday, July 12, 2009

Mark Martin scores fourth win of season at NASCAR race in Chicago

Mark Martin is proving "old" racers aren't slow drivers taking their time to head into retirement. The 50-year-old won last night's Lifelock.com 400 in Joliet, his fourth victory this season. From the Chicago Tribune:
The close-cropped stubble on his head contains as much salt as pepper, and the wrinkles run across Mark Martin's face like long-ago dried-up riverbeds. And for a while, twilight racing had a far less poetic meaning, semi-retirement leaving him with a loose grip on the track.

So it was with unmistakable giddiness that a man a half-century old took to the radio early in the LifeLock.com 400 on Saturday, his Chevrolet efficiently chopping through traffic and turning the Chicagoland Speedway's 1.5-mile tri-oval into a veritable senior circuit.

"This is easy, bud," Martin told crew chief Alan Gustafson.

He spoke far, far too soon, as double-file restart dueling extinguished his well-earned lead and then returned it to him, all in the final 50 laps. But in the end, Martin remained a 50-year-old verging, taking his series-leading fourth Sprint Cup victory of the year and reasserting his place in the chase for the first championship of a nearly three-decade career.

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