Mayfield keeps confidence no matter what lies ahead

Jeremy Mayfield has proven plenty in his 15-year Cup Series driving career, like, what it takes to win races -- which he's done five times -- and to contend for championships, which he did under both of NASCAR's recent point structures.

It's made him a competent and confident Sprint Cup driver -- and one whose achievements elevate him above the level of an average wheelman. It made him confident enough to enter the 2008 season at Haas CNC Racing without a contract.

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Was coming to a relatively new team with relatively little in the way of previous achievement a challenge? It sure was. But Mayfield was confident he and team management were on the same page.

It's too bad they weren't. Mayfield and Haas CNC general manager Joe Custer agreed following the event at Texas to make a change -- even though the originally proposed change was only for one race.

"Sometimes these things just don't work out," Mayfield said. "This was going to take time. I had it, I was committed to it. But someone felt like they had to do something."

Sometimes racers can feel backed into a corner, and they have to make choices. Mayfield chose to take the challenge of seeing what the next step in his driving career would be.

Mayfield's never been one to shrink from a challenge. If he was, he never would have knocked Dale Earnhardt out of the way to win at Pocono in 2000 for owner Roger Penske, a moment he calls his career highlight.

It wasn't the only one.

NASCAR's Chase format, which was designed to produce excitement, has never done as much as in 2004. With Kurt Busch's wheel-shedding, down-to-the-wire championship a scintillating finale, Mayfield did the ultimate man-up move and in a must-win situation. He won the Chase cutoff race at Richmond to make the inaugural 10-man championship field.

Nothing like that has ever happened at RIR since, save for Mayfield's former teammate Kasey Kahne finishing third there in 2006 to gain entry into the Chase.

Once again in 2005, when a berth in the second Chase was nowhere near certain, Mayfield, crew chief Slugger Labbe and Mayfield's team architect, Kenny Francis, engineered a key strategic victory at Michigan, and locked themselves into a second consecutive Chase.

But in the face of these achievements, which had occurred in concert with his race team becoming a solid, connected unit, Mayfield was then faced with maybe his greatest challenge to that point: the loss of his crew chief and reacquainting himself with a new team, even though things had all been shuffled within the same Evernham organization. (Continued)