Mears backing up win with strong late-season run

CONCORD, N.C. -- He saw Jimmie Johnson sweep the two annual races at Lowe's Motor Speedway in 2004 and 2005. He saw Kasey Kahne do the same last year. So Casey Mears thinks -- why not him?

The Hendrick Motorsports driver brings the same car to Charlotte that he used to win the Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day weekend, and comes to the 1.5-mile facility on the heels of four consecutive top-10 finishes. When Mears won in May, recording his first career victory in an event where fuel mileage shuffled many top drivers out of contention, it was a complete surprise. Should he win Saturday night, with a team that's at last finding some consistency, it wouldn't be.

"Knowing that you're coming back to a place where you won last time is definitely fun," said Mears, 14th-fastest in final practice Friday night. "We have a good car, it's the same car we won with here last time, and ran top-five, top-10 during the race. I think our team has slowly gotten better since we had that win in Charlotte and hopefully we can have that same good fortune. With Jimmie doing it for a couple of years and Kasey doing it, winning both races, we'd love to be in that category for sure."

At the finish of the track's classic 600-miler, Mears found himself at the front of a field jumbled by late fuel-only pit stops and pacing one of the most unlikely top-fives in recent memory. Many drivers received a much-needed boost that night, when Mears was followed across the line by J.J. Yeley, Kyle Petty, Reed Sorenson and Brian Vickers. But Mears is the only member of that group who can claim to have built on that momentum, even if the results didn't show themselves until several weeks later.

Yeley went 13 weeks without breaking back into the top 10, and will split from his Joe Gibbs Racing team at the end of this year. Petty missed seven races because of television obligations or a broken hand, and when he's been in the car hasn't finished better than 21st. Sorenson has finished outside the top 10 in 15 of 18 starts since Charlotte's May event, and Vickers -- who didn't qualify for Saturday night's race -- has continued to struggle to make the show.

Yet Mears backed up his victory at Lowe's with consecutive fourth-place finishes at Pocono and Michigan, notched a fifth at Chicago, and hasn't finished worse than eighth since the Sept. 16 event at New Hampshire. Before his breakthrough at Charlotte, the affable Californian was in 35th position in the Nextel Cup standings. Now, he's one point out of 14th, and 116 out of 13th.

What's the difference? Getting that first career victory took an immense amount of pressure off a driver and a team that had struggled with the expectations that go along with racing for Hendrick Motorsports. There's finally some consistency in the team's race-day lineup, which went through some changes in the early part of the year. And there's better communication between Mears and crew chief Darian Grubb, who was installed only a week before teams went to Daytona to open the season.

"We showed everybody that hey, we can do it," said Mears, who will start ninth Saturday. "We put ourselves in the right place at the right time, we had a good racecar, we showed we can win races. It kind of took that doubt out of everybody's mind and allowed us to focus on the job at hand, and that was going to the next race and trying to win that one. Our success over the last few months has just been jelling a little more, learning a little bit more about one another, understanding our ins and outs a little bit more, getting to know Darian a little bit more. All that stuff has just translated into better finishes." (Continued)