For four drivers, '09 finale more than end to season

HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- The checkered flag at the end of Sunday's Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway put the final punctuation mark on the 2009 season, but it also ended a chapter in the careers of at least four drivers in the field.

Martin Truex Jr., Jamie McMurray, Casey Mears and Reed Sorenson drove what most likely will be the last race for their respective teams, with varying degrees of success. While Truex survived the Tony Stewart-Juan Montoya dustup to score a ninth-place finish, McMurray and Mears finished in the middle of the pack and Sorenson was caught up in a strange multi-car accident on pit road.

Truex

Truex couldn't avoid Montoya's car after he cut his right-side tires after tangling with Stewart on the backstretch. And for the rest of the race, Truex struggled to keep the car off the wall.

"It wasn't as good after that," Truex said. "That's the story of our year. We have good cars and something like that happens. It's frustrating but the guys did good. I drove my guts out. I'm disappointed more than anything, last race together and all."

Truex has never driven for another team since making his Cup debut in 2004, so he had mixed feelings about climbing from the cockpit of the No. 1 Chevrolet for the final time.

"It's bittersweet," Truex said. "I'm excited about the future opportunities, but at the same time, it's hard to leave these guys. We've done a lot together, been together a long time and I've got a lot of respect for what they've been able to do for me in my career. We'll still be friends and hopefully they'll go on to great things and we will, too."

Truex is moving over to Michael Waltrip's Toyota operation for 2010, so the first task at hand will be getting acclimated.

"I imagine I'll be getting right back at it," Truex said. "We're working on the No. 56 car, putting that group together, getting to know them and then doing some testing. So we'll get back at it."

McMurray

McMurray, who wound up 18th, will replace Truex at Earnhardt Ganassi Racing. After the race was over, he sat on a low chair, his driver's suit unzipped to his waist, sipping on a drink and taking it all in.

"It's a lot different than when I left Ganassi," said McMurray, who has spent the past four seasons driving for Roush Fenway Racing after beginning his career for Chip Ganassi. "I left there on my own will. This isn't what anyone really wanted. Just with the way the economy is, there wasn't sponsorship and they eliminated the team. But, no, it really wasn't any different. Everybody came up and said, 'It was great working with you.' I've got a lot of friends on this team, and it's weird thinking you won't drive this car any more.

"That is life, I guess. You move on and you make the best of your new situation."

Just like Truex, there's no downtime for McMurray, as he'll be reporting for work as soon as he gets back home.

"Probably [Monday] or the next day," McMurray said. "Let everyone get home and get their stuff unloaded. I'll go over there and get my seat mounted and just get used to knowing everybody's name and talking with them. I know most of the guys, so it's not going to be that big a transition."

Video
• Truex bounces off Montoya-Stewart incident

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