The stubble on his head contains more salt than pepper, and the wrinkles run across Mark Martin's face like long-ago dried-up riverbeds. And for a while there, twilight racing had a far less poetic meaning for him, semi-retirement leaving him with a loose grip on the track.
So it was with unmistakable giddiness that a man half a century old took to the radio early in the LifeLock.com 400 on Saturday, his Chevrolet hastily and efficiently chopping through traffic and turning the Chicagoland Speedway's 1.5-mile oval into a veritable senior circuit.
"This is easy, bud," Martin told crew chief Alan Gustafson.
He spoke far, far too soon, as double-file restart dueling extinguished his well-earned lead and then returned it to him, all in the final 50 laps. But in the end, Martin remained a 50-year-old verging, taking his series-leading fourth Sprint Cup victory of the year and reasserting his place in the chase for the first championship of a nearly three-decade career.
"Rick Hendrick, he wouldn't quit," Martin said of the team owner who coaxed him back to full-time driving this year. "I was persuaded to do it. And I can't believe what an idiot I would have been. I had no idea it could be this much fun. The whole thing has been beyond my dreams."
Martin began the weekend perched just on the outside of the top 12 in the points standings, thanks to a 38th-place finish at Daytona International Speedway last weekend that capped a streak of three consecutive finishes outside of the top 10 after a victory in Michigan on June 14.
And after thoroughly dominating most of the race, Martin lost the lead to Jimmie Johnson off a double-file restart after a Sam Hornish Jr. crash on Lap 220. Martin recaptured the lead when a double-file restart pushed Johnson well back on Lap 252.
Thus continued a rejuvenation that began when Hendrick coaxed him back to a full-time racing schedule for 2009. Though there has been some rough luck along the way, Martin has nonetheless produced his fattest victory total since 1998, when he won seven races.
What's more, the win in Joliet erased a minor blemish from Martin's record, as the speedway was the only track at which he never had recorded a top-five finish. But as it did during the Nationwide Series race the previous night, the speedway rewarded those with the fastest cars, and Martin was among that group.
