For four drivers, '09 finale more than end to season (cont'd)

McMurray surveyed the scene and wondered what might have been, if a few things had gone differently.

"Winning the [Talladega] race obviously made our year," McMurray said. "But like everybody else, we had cars that could have finished better than they did, and at times, we didn't finish as well as we needed to. It all works itself out.

"Really since I've been at Roush, we just haven't had the success that we needed. I talked to Jack about it and you never know what the future holds, but we just didn't have success this time around."

Mears

Mears finished 19th and was visibly frustrated with the race -- and the season.

"We kind of got screwed, really," Mears said. "A crew guy on one of the other teams had a problem and they took [one of] ours. I lost five, six spots in the pits every time I came in and basically it determined our fate. We took a top-10 car and [didn't finish there]. You always like getting the opportunity. The bottom line is, all year long, every time I turned around, they changed something. And I had a chance to have a decent finish here and they took it again. I don't know what to say, to be honest."

Mears said there was chemistry between himself and crew chief Todd Berrier, but that evaporated when Berrier was moved to Jeff Burton's No. 31.

"It's clicked real good and they took it away," Mears said. "Me and Todd Berrier were going awesome. We were moving forward and they changed it. So there was a part where it was clicking and they made it worse."

Team competition director Scott Miller said Mears could still wind up returning to Richard Childress Racing in 2010, but "it's up in the air."

"We're really, really hoping that we can put something together to keep that on track," Miller said. "Because they've shown a lot of signs of improvement along with everybody else. And Casey Mears is a standup guy, and I'd really like to keep him in a ride, because he deserves to have one. He's done a good job for us."

So what will Mears do in the meantime?

"I don't know right now, man," Mears said. "I'll see what happens."

Sorenson

Sorenson's last ride with Richard Petty Motorsports ended prematurely when he was involved in a chain-reaction crash coming onto pit road after the caution flag for the first Stewart-Montoya fracas. Erik Darnell slowed in an attempt to get to his pit stall, which bunched up the cars following behind. Sorenson wound up as the sandwich between Paul Menard and RPM teammate Elliott Sadler, which destroyed his radiator and left him with a 40th-place finish.

"I'm not sure what happened," Sorenson said. "We were coming to pit road and all that you can see is the guy in front of you, so I was pretty close to [Menard]. I saw him check up and I got on the brakes hard. Elliott was behind me and it looks like he got him from behind, then he hit me from behind and I was a pinball in the middle.

"It's a shame that something that stupid had to wreck this many cars."

Video
• Chain-reaction wreck collects five cars on pit road