Mears extending family's legacy to NASCAR

JOLIET, Ill. (AP) -- Casey Mears and his team expected to make progress this year.

But this much? This soon?

Three years after switching to NASCAR after a lifetime in open-wheel racing, Mears is showing that his family's illustrious history isn't limited to Indy cars.

In only his second full season in NASCAR's top series, Mears already has seven top-10 finishes and has climbed to 16th in the Nextel Cup point standings.

	Mears led 34 laps at Atlanta earlier this season. Credit: Autostock

"We felt like he'd be way better off than he was last year, but we never expected where he's running now," said Andy Graves, team manager for Chip Ganassi Racing. "He's done a phenomenal job."

This kind of leap would be impressive for any young driver. But consider that Mears never even thought about racing stock cars until 2001, and what he's doing is downright amazing.

There was never any question that the 26-year-old Mears would race open-wheel cars. His uncle Rick won the Indianapolis 500 a record-tying four times, and his father, Roger, was an off-road champion.

Casey Mears was racing go-karts when he was 12, and quickly graduated to off-road. After a few years, he started running Formula LeMans and the Indy Lights series. Then it was on to CART and the Indy Racing League.

"I never dreamed of him coming to NASCAR. I just knew he was going to open-wheel racing," Roger Mears said. "When the sanctioning bodies split up and they started another open-wheel series, that whole open-wheel scene just started to fall apart. There weren't any opportunities over there."

After the 2001 season, Casey Mears had offers from CART and IRL, as well as an opportunity to drive in NASCAR's Busch Series. Not sure which open-wheel series was going to survive, Mears decided to try stock car racing.

"I thought, 'I'll try it out and if it doesn't work, in a year or two I'll go back to open-wheel when I know which direction is going to be the right direction to go,"' Mears said.

But the transition wasn't easy. Going from an open-wheel car to a stock car isn't like switching from a Ford to a Honda. More like a sports car to a semi-truck.

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He finished 21st with two top-10 finishes in his first Busch season, and figured his jump to NASCAR's top series was a year or two away. But when Ganassi fired Jimmy Spencer, he took a gamble on Mears.

"Last year was a huge learning year for me," Mears said. "I was struggling as far as just learning so much, from the tracks to the guys that I'm racing against to how stock cars in general want to respond to change and how they work.

"Not only was I learning how to compete at this level, but also learning stock cars as a basic," he said. "I mean I was learning stuff last year that guys learned in late models, when they're 18 years old, 16 years old."

The struggles were evident -- but so was the talent. Though he was 35th in the standings, he had five top-20 finishes.

"There were just so many times he just looked like, 'OK, he's got it. He can handle it,"' said Roger Mears, who drives his son's motorhome. "I just never had any doubt for a minute as far as his ability. It was just a matter of getting the car right.

"Toward the end of the season last year, I saw them really start to make a change."

When this season began, it was as if Mears had been driving stock cars his entire career. He finished seventh at Las Vegas, the third race of the year, and led 34 laps at Atlanta before his engine failed.

"I'm definitely happy but not really satisfied," Mears said. "At the beginning of the year, if we would have ran inside the top 15 on a consistent basis, we would have been really happy. But right out of the gate, we ran inside the top 10."

The biggest difference has been in Mears' knowledge of his car and comfort level with his crew. Last year, he could tell crew chief Jimmy Elledge that something was wrong with the front of his car, but couldn't get much more specific than that.

Casey Mears  •  Driver Page  •  2004 Stats  •  Driver vs. Driver

Mears can now explain exactly what is happening, and he and Elledge have developed a rapport that has translated into success on the track.

"The open-wheel guys, when they make the transition over here, once they learn what the car needs to feel like to be competitive -- which sometimes might take a year or two or three years -- once they figure that out, I think they do really well," Graves said.

Now that Mears has it figured out, he'd like to extend his family's history of success to a third series.

"I want to go to the Indy 500 someday, I really do," he said. "Other than that, even if that series got strong again, I wouldn't want to go back in that direction full time. I'm pretty happy where I am."