NASCAR ROUNDUP \ News and notes

Staying home: It looks like Mark Martin won’t get an early start on driving the No. 5 Chevrolet after all. Martin will move from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick Motorsports next season, taking over the No. 5 from Casey Mears, who is moving to Richard Childress Racing. It appeared last week that both of them would debut with their new teams at the Cup finale at Homestead. But Martin said Friday that the deal fell through and Phoenix next week will be his last race in the No. 8 DEI car. “I’ll be on the couch for Homestead with the remote,” Martin said. “I won’t be driving at Homestead, and as far as I know, I won’t even be visiting.” Martin said he made himself available to Hendrick, making sure his obligations to DEI were wrapped up at Phoenix. But the veteran racer said Childress was unable to work out a way to get Mears into a fourth RCR entry for Homestead. “It didn’t work out on the other side for Casey,” Martin said. “The details didn’t quite line up.”

Too long, too late: When the NFL season is done, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is like so many other football fans. “The season ends before you want it to,” Earnhardt said Friday. “You get just enough to get excited and then it’s all over and there’s such a long wait.” With a 36-race Cup schedule that runs February through mid-November, Earnhardt believes NASCAR is instead like baseball, hockey and other sports with long seasons. “There’s lulls and inactivity between the fan and the sport itself at times,” he said. “There’s no way to fix that.” Earnhardt remembers when the racing season was two months shorter, a 28-race schedule long before the inception of the Chase for the Sprint Cup. But he knows NASCAR won’t be returning to that kind of setup. “The sport was giving you just enough to get really excited about the next season,” he said. “We’ve already passed the point of no return. There’s no way we would change what we really already have here.”

Associated Press