Mark Martin made his 1,000 career NASCAR start in the Sharpie 500 race at Bristol. (Photo: Getty Images)
Saturday night was an evening that Mark Martin will remember for a long, long time.
Martin made his 1,000 career NASCAR start in the Sharpie 500 Sprint Cup race at Bristol Motor Speedway on Saturday night, a night that turned out about as well as he could reasonably expect.
The evening began with an emotional salute from the fans in the form of a giant grandstand card display congratulating him on reaching a milestone that only Richard Petty and Michael Waltrip have also hit.
During the race, Martin started from the pole and led a race-high 240 laps before finishing second, a mere 0.098 seconds behind race winner Kyle Busch. In the process, Martin moved from 12th in points, just 12 points ahead of the 13th-place driver, to 10th, 60 markers up on the now-13th-place Busch.
With two races to go until the Chase for the Sprint Cup begins, 60 points is far from a comfortable margin, but it’s a bigger one than Martin had before the race.
And in his post-race interviews, Martin made it clear that win, lose or draw, it had been a special evening for him.
“I'd first like to say that it was incredible what the fans did here tonight,” said Martin, who earned his seventh top-five finish of the season. “In my opinion, 1,000 starts ain't no big deal. But what they did made me cry. It's pretty cool. Almost get emotional thinking about it again. I love this sport as much as they do. I'm so grateful to have a chance to do what I did tonight, which is drive a really fast racecar and finish where it was running. … Yeah, we ran second, but I bet we had the fans on their feet those last few laps. You know, that's cool.”
Martin’s No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Impala SS was clearly the fastest car on the track, but two factors really hurt his chances of winning: The outside line was the preferred groove on restarts, something Martin was unable to overcome as he consistently started on the inside late in the race; and five cautions over the final 78 laps meant there were no long green-flag stretches at the end, and those were what Martin’s car seemed to like most.
