Martin’s Effort Not Good to Last Drop

FONTANA — In the end, it came down to a division problem.

Twenty-two gallons into 116 miles won’t go . . .

. . . even if you add three gallons . . .

. . . if you’re driving a Ford Thunderbird at 179 or so mph on a Sunday afternoon.

As Jeff Gordon took the checkered flag in the California 500 at California Speedway on Sunday, Mark Martin was low on the track--and coasting--a lap short and with a gas tank as dry as the road from the finish line to Antelope Valley.

After basking in the afterglow of top-five finishes in just about any car he chose to drive, and with two Winston Cup victories and a car stout enough to make it three, Martin was short of gas, and of temper.

And even shorter of time, because there’s no sense waiting around after you don’t win, particularly if you have a plane fueled up and ready to go at nearby Ontario Airport that can get you away from the scene of the crime, ahead of the requests for explanations of went wrong.

His offering was a couple of statements and a few race-car bromides as he headed for a car to whisk him away from his troubles, Albert Belle-style.

“What can you do?” he said. “We did our best. These racetracks are like this sometimes. Fuel mileage comes into play a lot of times.

“We’d been getting real good mileage [through the season], but it wasn’t good enough today. We had a real good car, a good team, and we were really good on the long runs.”

And at the end of the three-hour race, Martin was passed by eight cars in a matter of a few seconds on that final, ignominious, out-of-power lap.

The scenario was set when Martin pitted with 59 laps to go, taking on two tires and--most important--a full tank of gas. Gordon pitted three laps later and needed to run 110 miles.

Gordon managed not to run out of gas until after he had taken the checkered flag.

“They told me that Mark was definitely going to have to come in,” Gordon said of the word he was getting from his pit crew.

“I wanted to draft off of somebody that was at the speed I was, but when I went by him, it made my car handling go away. I couldn’t get very close to him, so it didn’t do me much good.”

Martin wasn’t willing to concede any role in preventing Gordon from running out of fuel too early. He figured it wasn’t the handling of Gordon’s car, but rather the power of Martin’s that opened distance between the two once Martin passed.

“[His team] talked about letting me go, but I was faster than him at the time and I caught him in a little jam-up in traffic,” Martin said. “Once I got in front of him, my car was faster, and the car behind was at a disadvantage. Once I got in front of him, he was disadvantaged. He would have liked to have stayed right up on me, but couldn’t.”

However, armed with the knowledge that Martin was a few drops short of a fuel load, Gordon didn’t argue when he was passed for the lead with 16 laps to run.

“He said, ‘Hey look, are you sure he has to pit?’ ” said Gordon’s crew chief, Ray Evernham, who had also been eavesdropping on scanner conversations between Martin and his straw boss, Jimmy Fennig, and knew their game plan.

“Then [Gordon] said, ‘We don’t need to be running in front of him then.’ ”

What happened was a rarity.

“It’s kind of hard to get Jeff Gordon to let anybody pass,” Evernham said.

Actually, it made sense because if he could have tucked into Martin’s slipstream--drafting, they call it--Gordon could save gas and every drop was going to be important.

That didn’t matter, as it turned out.

“But if he didn’t pit for gas, I was really going to be mad,” Gordon said.

Said Evernham, who had done both the math and the radio spying: “There was no way he was going to go three laps farther [than Gordon] on a tank of gas. We just knew he was going to pit.”

Martin did pit, taking a second less than he should have doing so. Another half-gallon of gas wouldn’t have enabled him to catch up to Gordon, but it would have continued an incredible run for Martin, who over the last eight weeks had moved into second place behind Gordon in the Winston Cup points race--piling up 100 more points than any of his competitors and earning $552,890.

At the race’s end, though, after his 10th-place finish, that deficit had stretched from 46 to 92 points.

“We had a real good car on the long runs,” Martin said. “We needed long runs at the end.”

And a few drops more of gas to run them.