No Sunshine State

Being known as the best driver to never win a Winston Cup championship or a Daytona 500 doesn’t faze Mark Martin in the least.

“I have accomplished enough -- four IROC championships, 33 Winston Cup wins and 41 poles and 45 Busch Grand National wins -- that if my career ended today, I wouldn’t feel like I missed anything,” Martin said as he began preparations Friday for his 19th Daytona 500.

“Really, I don’t know why people keep asking me about not winning a championship. I would hate to think that my career would be a failure without that. I’m very, very proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish.”

The statistic that raises the question is four runner-up finishes in Winston Cup, last year by 38 points to Tony Stewart, in 1998 by 364 to Jeff Gordon, and in 1994 by 444 and in 1990 by 26 to the late Dale Earnhardt. Martin would have won in 1990, had his team not been fined 46 points for a nonregulation carburetor spacer found in his Ford after a race at Richmond, Va.

Then there’s Martin’s inherent pessimism.

Martin, 44, who came to major league racing from a dirt-track background in Arkansas, seems to be continually surprised at what he has accomplished, unwilling to believe it could happen to someone from the Ozarks.

“I never really looked at last year and allowed myself to think I might win it,” he said. “That’s good for me, because that way, when I don’t win, I don’t feel any letdown. I give everything I have to everything I do and that way, if I don’t win, I still am not disappointed.”

Looking forward to Daytona, he talks more about his dislike for restrictor-plate racing than he does about the new No. 6 Ford car he will be driving.

Restrictor plates, used only at Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway, are thin metal plates with four holes that restrict air flow from the carburetor into the engine to reduce horsepower and keep speeds down.

Martin has never finished higher than third in 35 races at Daytona -- 18 500s and 17 Pepsi 400s -- but he has finished in the top six in four of his last six starts here.

“We had pretty good cars at the [Daytona] test and I think we have a chance to run pretty well,” Martin said. “Everyone knows that I’m not the biggest fan of restrictor-plate racing, but this is the best I’ve felt going into Daytona in a long time.

“That doesn’t mean that we’ll get better results, but the fact is that we are more ready than ever.”

Martin had reason to be pessimistic after finishing 12th in the standings in 2001, the first time in his career he had been worse than eighth.

“The 2000 season was disappointing, but 2001 was definitely devastating to me personally,” he said. “There are no guarantees in this business and I didn’t know if the magic would ever be back or not -- someday it won’t. It might be 20 years from now or might be right now, but someday the magic will be gone.”

Pessimistic he may be, but Martin does have a sense of humor.

Rusty Wallace has offered to give a free six-pack of his sponsor’s Miller Lite beer to every legal drinker at the race if he wins the Daytona 500. Martin responded by saying, “I think you’d see an awful lot of doctor’s visits if we did a deal like that.”

Martin is sponsored by Viagra.

He and 18 other Winston Cup drivers will get Speed Weeks moving tonight with the Budweiser Shootout, a 70-lap made-for-TV race involving pole winners from 2002 and previous Shootout winners. Martin did not win a pole but is eligible as the 1999 winner.

Curiously, it is the only oval race he has ever won on Daytona’s 2 1/2-mile D-shaped oval, but he has won four times on the Rolex 24 road course, driving Ford Mustangs and Mercury Cougars in the GT class.

Martin will start ninth tonight after positions were drawn by lot. The Shootout consists of one 20-lap segment, followed by a 10-minute break and a second 50-lap segment to the finish.

This will be its first time under the lights. In previous years, front-row qualifying was held on Saturday with the Budweiser Shootout, formerly the Busch Clash, on Sunday afternoon.

“We’ll have a different car in the Shootout than we use for the 500,” Martin said. “But both are brand-new chassis we tested last month. I think night racing is exciting. It’s fantastic for the fans and the competitors too.

“Hopefully, we can get a good start out of the gate and then maintain that throughout the entire season. Sometimes you just need to be lucky.”

His predictions for the 500 are not exactly oozing with confidence, however.

“I would expect we should qualify between 12th and 18th, which is way better than last year, when we had to take a provisional to get in the race. But for me to predict a better finish than sixth would be a stretch because that’s a hard thing to do here.”

Martin may be pessimistic about his own racing program, but he is downright euphoric when talking about the racing talents of his son Matt.

Matt, who turned 11 in December, won two track championships on the quarter-midget track his father had built in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. Then he followed that up by setting two track records en route to a sixth-place finish nationally in Racing Bandoleros cars for kids under 12.

“Watching Matt race, and all those kids 5, 6, 7 years old, is exciting to me,” Martin said. “I think it’s amazing what they can do at that age. And to see the light shine in their eyes is worth all the work. These kids are going to be the stars of tomorrow, and sooner than you think.

“I guess it’s a sign of the times that drivers are getting younger and younger, the way it is in Winston Cup today. Twenty years ago, if you were 22 years old and incredibly talented, you couldn’t get in a winning Winston Cup car to save your life. It wouldn’t happen. Now, you can bump a veteran right out of the seat if you are really good.

“When I broke in, nobody was gonna take a chance on anybody but veteran guys like Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip and Cale Yarborough. Why in the world would they put myself or Rusty Wallace, or somebody like that, in at that time? It’s different now, and Jeff Gordon is largely responsible for that change.

“If a sponsor signs a young guy and he turns the whole world upside down, like Jeff Gordon did or like Kurt Busch is fixing to do, man, that’s so much better than going along with a lukewarm situation for years. It’s a gamble that they’re taking that seems to be a risk worth taking that wasn’t worth taking in the past.”

Gordon was 22 when he was rookie of the year and was 24 when he won the first of his four Winston Cup championships.

Like Matt Martin, he began racing when he was 5.