Martin's lesson from 1990

As Mark Martin battles Hendrick Motorsports teammates Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon for NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series championship going into Sunday’s Checker Auto Parts 500 at Phoenix International Raceway, memories return of a costly call to pit on Nov. 4, 1990 at the Arizona track.

That decision in the desert, combined with another even bigger one made a few days later prior to the season finale at the track then known as Atlanta International Raceway, proved critical as Martin and his Roush Racing team lost the Winston Cup title to Dale Earnhardt by 26 points.

Martin, still seeking a first championship after being the runner-up four times, presently is 73 points behind Johnson with the Phoenix race and the Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 22 remaining. Mark is 39 points ahead of Gordon.

The popular Martin’s resurgence as a sentimental favorite for the title at age 50 evokes recollections of his splendid chance to become champion 19 years ago.

In 1990 Martin led Earnhardt by 45 points when they arrived in Phoenix. The advantage would have been an almost insurmountable 91 except for a penalty of 46 points the Roush outfit incurred in the Pontiac 400 at Richmond in March.

NASCAR officials took the action, still controversial and disputed by team owner Jack Roush to this day, because the carburetor spacer plate on the engine of Martin’s Ford was bolted to the manifold rather than welded.

During the Checker 500 of 1990, Earnhardt took the lead on the 51st of 312 laps on the 1-mile track and stayed ahead the rest of the way. Meanwhile, Martin was running respectably, keeping Earnhardt’s Chevrolet in sight.

Then, while in sixth place on Lap 296 of the 500-kilometer event, Martin decided to pit for four tires during a caution period.

It was a mistake. Martin ran the tires off his car trying to make up the lost distance. He finished 10th, as Earnhardt won.

The difference vaulted Earnhardt and his Richard Childress Racing team into the standings lead by six points.

“Mark and his guys won’t be able to go to Atlanta and hope for us to have bad luck,” said Earnhardt. “Now, they'll have to force the issue, and they're fully capable of doing that, just like we are."

Martin fretted about deciding to make the late pit stop and taking tires all around.

“We did the right thing, didn’t we?” he asked a couple times over the radio hookup to his pit crew, led by Steve Hmiel and Robin Pemberton. The answer was mixed.

Obviously, Martin would have preferred to go to Georgia leading the standings toward a title that then was worth about $1 million. But he indicated that in a way he was somewhat relieved it would be an all-out race for the crown.

"We want to win this championship, and now the only way we can do it is to outrun Dale," said Martin. "That has to be done.

"It takes all the pressure off. I don't know why, but now I don't feel any pressure.

"I feel we had a bad day. It could have been worse, but we really should have finished better. We had better than a 10th-place car.

"Now, I don't have to worry about getting outrun by Dale and losing the championship. Now, all I've got to think about is going down there and race to win, and I'm excited about that."

Both teams had plans to begin testing almost immediately for the dramatic showdown at Atlanta.

Martin's team was to be at the Georgia track Tuesday through Thursday, with Earnhardt’s on Wednesday and Thursday.

Roush ordered three different Thunderbirds taken to the Georgia speedway and Martin drove all of them Tuesday and Wednesday.

However, it wasn`t the amount of machinery that longtime NASCAR observers found so surprising, but who was present to offer input about the cars.

Testing an unpainted Ford, owned by the auto company, was veteran Winston Cup competitor Morgan Shepherd, who at the time drove for the Bud Moore Engineering team.

And conferring after each run by Martin and Shepherd were Roush, fellow Ford team owners/engineers Robert Yates and Junie Donlavey, Eddie Wood of the Wood Brothers team, Ford engineer Preston Miller and chassis specialist Jake Elder, who worked for Yates.

Roush, Elder and Miller appeared the most active, with the latter two relaying information back and forth between Martin and Shepherd as they sat in the cars, waiting for adjustments to be made between runs.

The "official" explanation for the concerted effort:

A revolutionary steering design of the late car builder Banjo Matthews was being tried in the hope that it might help deliver Ford the NASCAR manufacturers championship. Chevy held a 184-181 lead for an eighth straight title, a crown Ford hadn`t captured since 1969.

Shepherd smilingly conceded, though, that he and the others were working on behalf of Martin.

"I'm hopeful of finding something that will help me win the Atlanta race and Ford win the manufacturers' deal, of course," said Shepherd. "But all of us Ford people really want to see Mark win the championship."

The three cars driven by Martin and the one by Shepherd were parked side-by-side in the track's sprawling garage area.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, from a location about 100 yards away at the other end of the garage, Earnhardt alternately tested two Chevrolets as team owner Richard Childress and crew chief Kirk Shelmerdine directed operations.

Asked his reaction to the joint Ford preparations, Earnhardt smiled.

"They've got a lot of irons in the fire, don't they?" he said. "It seems pretty late in the season to me to be engineering. Sure, we've noticed all the Ford people up there, but it doesn't bother us."

The race for the title continued to be civil and diplomatic, a fact both Earnhardt and Martin said they were proud to have maintained. This situation was stressed when the two contenders ate lunch together.

As Earnhardt sat eating barbecue in the track's infield media center, Martin approached, put his plate on the table and pulled up a chair.

"Well, you put it on us Sunday at Phoenix," said Martin.

"We ran good," nodded Earnhardt. "I kept expecting you to come up there and race with me, like we have all year."

"I wanted to, but couldn't," replied Martin. "My car was too tight at the start of the race. When we adjusted, it got too loose and that was burning my tires off."

After lunch, Martin explained the rare move of bringing four cars to a track.

"It’s imperative that we be at our best,” said Mark. “I think winning is what it will take to beat Dale here. Atlanta is a great track for him.”

At the time, Earnhardt had six Atlanta victories, including three of the speedway’s four previous 500-milers.

After making a sustained 25-lap run on Wednesday, Earnhardt's team decided to pass on scheduled further testing Thursday, loaded up and headed home to North Carolina.

It was a psychological ploy, as both Earnhardt and team owner Childress later smilingly admitted. Earnhardt added to the mind game by revealing that he was heading to Alabama to deer hunt.

"We knew the Ford people would notice, and that by leaving after only one day we would drive them crazy,” said Earnhardt.

It appeared to do just that.

By Thursday, Roush and his Ford advisers decided to have one of the Thunderbirds that Davey Allison drove for Yates brought to Atlanta for Martin to test.

The result looked promising in finding some chassis combination or engine factor that might prove pivotal in overtaking Earnhardt. A late run in the Allison car produced a lap of 176.463 mph, fastest by far overall among the dozen or so teams that tested during that week in 1990.

The speed left Martin and his teammates smiling.

"We'll try and duplicate what we learned off Robert's car and put it on ours," Martin said. "We feel going in the only way to beat Dale for this championship is to outrun him, and maybe this will help us do that."

"We're reaching, grasping for something new that will give us even the slightest performance advantage," said Roush.

Understandably, the Roush/Martin contingent was non-committal about what developed from the research runs.

"Basically, the result of all this work is that we've narrowed our choices from four cars to two," Roush said. "Those two will go in the Lockheed wind tunnel at Marietta (Ga.) Sunday and we will see which has the best aerodynamics.

"Then Mark, Steve, Robin and me will go through everything and choose our car for the race."

Looking back, I vividly remember an incredible scene as Martin’s testing neared an end. As track closing time loomed at 5 p.m. Martin pulled one car in, sat conferring briefly with Hmiel and Pemberton, then crawled out.

He was met by Roush, who repeatedly had climbed atop a transporter for a better view of the laps, then descended for consultations.

Roush put his arm around Martin’s shoulders, whispered some information, then patted the driver on the back four times. Martin dashed off to crawl in another car and return to the track.

It looked just like a football coach giving his quarterback the big play on the sideline and sending him into the game to execute it.

I remarked about the similarity to Preston Miller, the Ford engineer. Miller nodded and smiled.

"I just hope it doesn't turn out that the play has to be a Hail Mary,” he said.

In a stunner, it was decided that the Yates team’s Ford would be entered for Martin rather than a car from the Roush stable.

Not all involved were happy about the decision.

“This sucks,” Pemberton, now NASCAR’s vice president for competition, said privately on the morning of the race.

That it did.

Martin wasn’t able to really get going in the Yates-owned car and finished sixth while Earnhardt took third place and claimed the fourth of the seven Winston Cup championships he was destined to win. Shepherd won the race, marred by the death of Mike Ritch, a crewman for Bill Elliott, in a pit road accident.

“We had to do something out of the ordinary,” Martin said of his move into the Yates car. “It didn’t work out.”

Bet on Martin, by far the big-time stock car racing tour’s most respected driver, being in his Hendrick team’s OWN machinery for this year’s final two races.

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