Mark Martin (Right) and crew chief Alan Gustafson (Left) finished second in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship in 2009. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

He united forces with Gustafson, a childhood fan of Martin’s and crew chief who had worked with Kyle Busch and Casey Mears within the Hendrick organization.

They believed in their ability to build a top-tier team. So the opening run didn’t throw them off their game.

And even though the finishes weren’t what they had hoped, there were bright spots in that opening segment of the season.

“Even when we had trouble they didn’t get down,” Martin said. “Even at those events we would be fastest in practice at times and stuff like that and when you would see our car go to the top of the scoring monitor, those guys would just beam. I mean, they would just light up. And that really was cool.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of the season was that team unity, that belief in one another.

Gustafson said that when he was a young race fan, he viewed Martin as a “man’s man” and tried to emulate that work ethic he witnessed.

“He always worked very hard for what he got, and if he fell short, he was the first guy to stand up and take the blame, and he would not point the finger and get into controversy,” Gustafson says. “He'd go back and work harder and come back that much better.”

That’s the kind of dedication Gustafson seems to have created within his team as well.

It’s a mindset that the entire group adopted this season.

When the year ended, Martin said it was the first time in a while that he can remember not being glad that the season was over.

After his first year at Hendrick, he appeared both enamored of the organization’s strength – and unwilling to take credit for helping an already successful team and crew chief have its best showing.

“To me, what I really brought to that race team was only one thing and that was confidence and their mindset and it was just my goal to help them achieve the kind of success that they were capable of and I think we did real well in that area,” Martin said.

Gustafson sees it as much more than that.

He says that sometimes when you meet or work with people that you grew up thinking well of, it doesn’t work out all that well.

That wasn’t the case with Martin.

“I think I'm a bigger Mark Martin fan today than I was before I knew him, and I have more respect for him today than I did then,” Gustafson said. “That's a really neat thing.”

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