(As told by Mark Martin)

The NASCAR off-season is typically slow, with little in the way of breaking news.

But not the current off-season. It’s like the 2025 season never ended in terms of news, with the only thing missing being actual racing. During the off-season, we had the settlement of the contentious lawsuit between NASCAR and 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports. We also had the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of seven people, including NASCAR great Greg Biffle, his wife and two children, and the death of Denny Hamlin’s father and critical injuries suffered by his mother in a horrific house fire.

In addition, NASCAR finally unveiled the long-awaited change to the playoff system for 2026 and beyond. NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps announced his resignation effective at the end of January, and we inducted Kurt Busch, Harry Gant, Ray Hendrick and Humpy Wheeler into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.

We’re now headed in the homestretch en route to the 68 running of the Daytona 500 on Sunday, February 15. The race and Speedweeks will be bittersweet: while everyone is excited to get the new season underway, we will also mark a sad milestone – the 25 anniversary of the death of Dale Earnhardt in the 2001 Daytona 500 on February 18.

Personally, I enjoyed a great holiday with my family. I turned 67 years old in January, I’ve been doing a lot of traveling, seeing friends and fans all over this great country. I’m getting more excited by the day for the release of my book “Never Lift,” which is due to come out in early summer (and which I’ll share another story from the book in today’s column). I recently started a regular podcast with my good buddy Kenny Wallace and, of course, I’m enjoying my pieces right here on EssentiallySports.

And, of course, I’m excited for the start of the new season. I really believe 2026 will be a year that is going to be very memorable, one of the best we’ve seen in our sport in a long time.

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Let’s reflect upon the off-season and look ahead to the 2026 season

So, with my co-writer Jerry Bonkowski asking the questions, let’s reflect back on some of the things that have taken place in the three-month off-season:

1) Can you talk about the tragic loss of Greg Biffle, his wife and two children, plus three others, as well as the horrific house fire that claimed the life of Denny Hamlin’s father and seriously injured his mother?

“Greg and I were obviously teammates and immersed in our racing program. I knew Greg from his very start with Roush Racing and everything. I didn’t stay as tightly connected with him away from the racing, but like all of the racing community, I admired all the great things that he did during his racing career and after he retired. He was just a really, really good person. Did a lot of great things for a lot of people and brought a lot of smiles to a lot of people’s faces. It’s such a tragic, dark time for us, along with Denny’s loss as well of his father. All we have now is the memories, and I have great memories of my great experience at Roush.”

(Perhaps more so than most people in NASCAR, Mark Martin can relate to the Biffle tragedy as he lost his father, step-mother and half-sister who were killed in a plane crash in Nevada in 1998).

2) Do you have a favorite story about Greg Biffle?

“When I think of my favorite recollection of Greg Biffle, I really think of the time in 2005, we were at Kansas, I was leading late and he was chasing me down but I still managed to hold on for the win (by just over a half-second). After the race, he laughed because he could see me up ahead of him, slipping and sliding, trying hard to stay out front. I got that one.

“And then not long after that, about six races later in the final race of the season at Homestead, Greg and I had an epic 20-lap battle at the end of the race. He wound up beating me by about three feet. We had some great races together and he was a good teammate and friend.”

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3) Your thoughts on the resignation of NASCAR commissioner Steve Phelps? Were you surprised that he stepped down?

“I would have been shocked if it didn’t happen. After the things that came out through the lawsuit, it would have been a shocking surprise to me if that didn’t happen. That whole lawsuit was a very ugly thing and it’s going to take a while for everyone to get over and get past, but it had the best possible outcome I think that it could have had. I’m really happy for NASCAR in general, the fans and the teams. I’m happy for everyone to have it behind us and moving forward and starting to, I would say, head the ship in the right direction.”

4) Are you surprised that after several years of lobbying to have a commissioner role in the sport, Phelps will likely go down as the first and only commissioner in the sport’s history, with a tenure of only 10 months, as NASCAR has announced they will not fill that position once Phelps leaves office?

“No, not really. When you look at the lawsuit and everything that transpired in it, there were going to have to be some things that happened. Who knows if this move to move him into commissioner was just a move to as a long-term part of what was going to come out in the lawsuit. Steve Phelps is being sacrificed at this point. Sometimes you just need to make changes in anything you do. Your race team, sometimes a crew chief has to go for something for reasons that he really doesn’t deserve it, but you have to make a change.

“I feel like NASCAR was going to have to make a change when all the dust settled in this. And you have to start change at the top. I’m not surprised and I ain’t mad. I also think it’s totally inappropriate to bash Steve Phelps. I don’t think that we should be doing that. I think we should be focusing on moving forward and turning the ship in the right direction. I think that’s what we should be doing right now, and not hyper-focusing on Steve Phelps and what his job was and what he did and what his part was. He did some good things for the sport, helped champion some good things, and he presided over some bad things. So let’s just move on.”

5) Would you be interested in running NASCAR?

“My first answer was obviously no. Honestly, I love this sport so much and I care so much about it that I would consider it. But it would take some in-depth looking at it and research. I love the sport and I want to see it thrive. I want to see the fans enjoy it and love it. And that’s all I can really say about that. But it’s not something that would ever be offered to me anyway. Instead of saying no, I would say I love the sport so much that I would be willing to do whatever I could to try to get it to where it could thrive again.”

6) How much are you looking forward to the 2026 season?

“Yeah, I’m really optimistic and I can’t wait to get started.”

Who are some of the drivers Mark can see winning the 2026 Cup Championship?

7) Is there a guy that you’re leaning towards winning the championship? Could Denny come back and be more determined than ever to win it? Or is there somebody else? How do you look at 2026?

“I really like Christopher Bell. Under other past championship formats, he would have been our champion already. He’s fabulous when it comes to consistency. And I think he would make us a great champion. I think that this could be his year. Sentimentally. I’d love to see Denny come back and win it. I was pulling for him last year, I’d like to see it happen and he could do it. Or it could be a challenging year for him after everything that he’s been through. He certainly could do it. If anybody was dominant in 2025, it was him. He’s definitely got the potential to come back and do it again.”

8) Is there a guy or team you see as a dark horse to win the championship?

“I don’t see anything that you would put in that category. I mean, obviously, Chase Briscoe or Christopher Bell could be in that position, but they wouldn’t be considered dark horses in my opinion. It’s really for someone outside of Gibbs and Hendrick or Penske, really, to pull one off right now. But it certainly could be done. There are a lot of great teams. (Tyler) Reddick has been brilliant. 23XI has been brilliant. There’s been a lot of teams that have been really impressive that aren’t in the top three. Anybody could break out, all they have to do is hit something setup-wise or car-wise that no one else has figured out yet and they can shine for just long enough to pull off a championship. But the season isn’t all about a championship. There’s a dadgum race every weekend.

“And the championship (is the culmination) of the massive battles that are had every Sunday.”

How about sharing another story about your career from your upcoming book?

9) I know you’re growing more excited by the day for when your book comes out in about four or five more months. We’ve shared some stories from the book in previous columns here on EssentiallySports. What’s a story you’d like to impart for this episode?

“There’s so much to talk about in the book. It’s at the publisher, it’s edited, it’s about 460 pages. So there’s an awful lot. I had an entire career prior to joining Roush Racing in 1988 that a lot of people don’t know about – and that time of my career was very important.

“One of the things that I was most proud of is when I turned 20 years old (in 1979), I moved from Arkansas to North Liberty, Indiana, because (chassis builder) Ray Dillon gave me an old pole barn to work out of for free and I rented a house for 150 bucks next to it. I took two employees with me, (crew chief and Martin’s early mentor) Banjo Grimm and David Leventhal, my ex-brother-in-law, with me up there and we went to work racing. We won the ASA (American Speed Association) national championship with one race car, an open trailer, as everyone else in ASA had back then, and out of that little old pole barn next to Dillon Enterprises.

“And during that ‘79 season, Ray and I designed the Dillon Mark II chassis, because my number was “2”. The chassis debuted in 1980 and won everything. We conquered the short track world. It was an incredible time. We won the ASA championship, set track records at almost probably 80% of the races that I went to in 1980. We broke the track record so many times with that race car and everyone had to buy one, including Rusty Wallace, Dick Trickle, Butch Lindley, David Pearson, Darrell Waltrip, even Dale Earnhardt bought one. Everyone seemed to buy one; it was what you had to have. It was THE car.

“Ray was such an unbelievable character and was so good for me and my career. He was just a farmer kind of guy that loved racing, that tried to race himself and then latched onto me and built his business building race cars. It’s pretty darn incredible what we did out of North Liberty, Indiana in ‘79, ‘80 and ‘81. I can’t wait for the fans to read that story in the book because it’s fascinating. The one thing that I liked — the concept of going way, way, way back to the beginning — is that it also is a good introduction into what happened to Mark Martin.”

(Click here to watch the interview with Ray Dillon)

10) When you built the No. 2 chassis, could you have ever envisioned the career you were about to embark upon and the success you’d go on to have in NASCAR and the notoriety and culminating with induction into the NASCAR Hall of Fame?

“I had already won the ASA national championship at 19 years old (in 1978) out of Arkansas and then I won it again in ‘79. So I was two-time ASA national champion, which was a big deal at the time. People today don’t understand that but it was a big time series back then, it was a pretty big deal. But I also had my eyes on NASCAR. I wanted to be a NASCAR driver but I had no idea how to get there from where I was because I didn’t have the wherewithal or contacts.

“All I knew to do was to keep winning races and winning championships. So, I was fairly established by the time we broke out our No. 2 race car, but that just took us and my notoriety to the next level. I had been getting a lot of National Speed Sport News coverage back then; it like X/Twitter today. I was in Speed Sport News all the time, and they were covering me in Stock Car magazine a lot, too. And there were ads for products. The way I was able to race back then, I didn’t have a money sponsor, but I had all product sponsors. So I got wheels, brakes, tires, springs, everything for free. All these manufacturers’ parts gave me all the components of the car.

“So my name was building from 1977 on. And when I first came to NASCAR racing, a lot of people knew who I was already because of my success that I’d had in ASA because it was a very much respected series. Darrell Waltrip raced it all the time, and Bobby Allison and a bunch of the other guys would come run those races when they could, just because they were a big deal. And because they were racers, they didn’t just race NASCAR, they raced everything they could race.”

11) In conclusion, is there anything on your bucket list that you still haven’t accomplished or achieved?

“I’m happy with what I’ve done. I love being retired. I work really hard every day and am busy as I ever was when I raced. That’s what people, human beings, were designed for: to get after it. And I get after it every day.”