No, he's not retired; he's hooked on track life

By DAVID POOLE
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Mark Martin, for the nine-thousandth time, never planned to retire at the end of the 2005 NASCAR season.
"I couldn't quit racing," Martin says. "Racing has been my life since I was 15 years old, and I'm certainly not ready to give it up. That's what I live for."
What he fully intended to do, however, was walk away from full-time Nextel Cup competition. He looked forward, he'd say, to enjoying himself in the Truck Series or, if that didn't work out, in a late-model car at short tracks all over.
"I was extremely excited about opening a new chapter in my life," Martin says.
A year ago, nobody would have believed four-time champion Jeff Gordon would struggle in 2005. Nobody could have known that 2004 champion Kurt Busch's title defense would end in a tawdry ego-off between the driver and a Maricopa County sheriff's deputy in the Arizona desert.
Certainly, nobody could have forecast Martin would be back for another season.
It seemed infinitely more likely that Rusty Wallace would renege on retirement. But here we are. Wallace is beginning his career as race team owner/television celebrity and Martin is suiting up one more time.
Family gave blessing
The why and how of Martin's return is no more complicated than the fact that, for business reasons, team owner Jack Roush needed Martin for one more year.
Roush and Martin have stood shoulder to shoulder in the sport since 1988, and once Martin was convinced Roush really needed him to keep the No. 6 team they've built together moving forward, that part of the decision was made.
But there were other factors, most significantly that he'd promised his wife, Arlene, and his son, Matt, that after 2005 the demands of NASCAR's toughest and biggest series would be in his rear-view mirror.
"One of the first commitments I made for 2006 was to put my family first," Martin says. "So Jack and Matt and Arlene had the conversation about doing this before we went any further. If they had said no, then I wouldn't be here today."
Martin, 47, will race more this year than he has in a long time.
In addition to the full Cup schedule, he'll also run seven Busch Series races -- after arguing that down from 14 -- and will share duties in the truck he'd otherwise be in this year with young David Ragan as he tries to get that team started for the 2007 season. Martin also will defend his International Race of Champions series title.
When he was here last month for testing, Martin still hadn't figured out how he's going to gird himself for another year of Nextel Cup. He knows how he'd like to approach the year.
"I'm going to have some fun and it's either going to be good or not," he says, "and I'm going to be willing to accept whatever kind of results we have."
But he also knows it'll be hard for him to do that.
Go out and have fun
Martin says that last year -- when he won the Nextel All-Star Challenge and a points race at Kansas on his way to a fourth-place points finish -- was by far the best year, personally and professionally, of his career. He knows himself well enough, he fears, to know he'll work harder this year to match or surpass that.
"I just want everybody to make sure that they know that they're talking to a guy that had a blast last year," he says. "It would mean an awful lot to me to have the same kind of performance on the race track this year, so therefore I'm willing to be miserable if need be in order to have that.
"My tendency is to go off on that misery side to try to make sure that we get that performance. I'm going to fight that a little bit. Jack says, 'Don't worry about it. Just go have fun with it this year. The pressure is off and you might do better than you ever have.'
"Doggone it, that's a good strategy. I just wish it would work for me."