motorntv.com - Clock Ticking For Martin, Earnhardt

Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are outside the top 12 in NASCAR Sprint Cup points...

Teammates Dale Earnhardt Jr. (Left) and Mark Martin (Right) talk in the NASCAR Sprint Cup garage area. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

At the moment, Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. are on the outside looking in, with the clock starting to wind down.

With 20 of 26 races complete in NASCAR’s regular season, Martin is 13th in the Sprint Cup points standings, 62 behind Clint Bowyer in the race for the final transfer spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Earnhardt is 14th, 93 points in arrears of Bowyer.

And with just six races left until the Chase field is set, Martin and Earnhardt both need to come up big at Pocono Raceway, site of Sunday’s Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500. It will be a tall order — neither man has ever won a Cup race at the 2.5-mile triangle, although Earnhardt has been runner-up twice and Martin has finished second here six times

Recent trends aren’t especially encouraging, either. In his last 12 starts, Earnhardt has just one top-five finish — fourth in the Coke Zero 400 — while in his last 11 starts, Martin has only finished in the top 10 once. In his last seven starts, Martin’s best finish was 11th at last weekend’s Brickyard 400.

At least the Brickyard was an improvement; Martin was so happy with his car there that the team is taking it to Pocono again this weekend, an unusual step given that turning around a car once it’s been raced usually takes a couple of days. Martin said he thinks it’s the right decision.

“That's one of the best cars we've had for awhile,” said Martin, who last year won five races and finished second in points after being winless since 2005.

“The guys have been working very, very hard on every detail to get our cars to the place we want them to be,” said Martin. “I think that we showed improvement at Indianapolis. We qualified well (third). We ran up front. We just faded a bit at the end. I'm glad we're bringing this car back this weekend. I think the team has a lot of confidence in it, and I think it's one of many steps in the right direction.”

Teammates Mark Martin (Left) and Dale Earnhardt Jr. (Right) are both fighting for a berth in the Chase. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Martin can ill-afford a repeat of the June race, where he got caught up in a late-race incident and finished 29th.

“We really struggled with the handling of our car all day,” Martin said of his earlier Pocono run. “The car would be nearly perfect on fresh tires, but as those tires wore out, we lost all grip on the track and just couldn't hold our speed.”

And when you don’t run up front, you put yourself in harm’s way, especially during late-race restarts.

“I think we would have had a decent 10th- or 12th-place finish there at the end, but, as everyone saw, the competition just got crazy on the green-white-checkered restart,” said Martin. “When that many cars are on the lead lap, and you've got two laps to duke it out, we're all going to run over one another. That's what happened. It ruined our race and really hurt us in points, but it happens. We just have to take what we learned from that race and apply it this weekend and hopefully gain some of those points back.”

Earnhardt didn’t have a great first Pocono race, either, finishing a disappointing 19th. He’s looking for a better result this time around.

“The corners are so different it's so easy to try to improve one thing and just screw up something that wasn't even a problem,” said Earnhardt, who is in danger of missing the Chase for the fourth time in six seasons. “So when we've run good, we've had awesome race cars. Hopefully we'll have another one.”