Mark Martin won 40 Sprint Cup races during his career, which puts him 17th on the all-time wins list. It would seem that the racetrack would be more or less home to him.
But since his retirement after the 2013 Sprint Cup season, Martin hadn't attended a race until Sunday at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
He had been at one practice day to help Danica Patrick and left before qualifying even started. He just felt like he didn't belong.
Say what? A driver whose Sprint Cup career spanned 33 years and who started 882 Cup races (not to mention more than 300 races in NASCAR's other national series and the International Race of Champions events) just felt out of place without a driver's suit on.
"There are a lot of race car drivers that are normal in the head," the 57-year-old Martin said last week. "But some of us are a little bit mental. I'm not claiming that my thinking is correct. But when you no longer drive a race car, what use are you in the garage after you've been a race car driver?
"So you're going to hang around and tell somebody that might or might not want to know what happened 30 years ago? It's weird. I didn't think I had a place."
Martin might feel he has more of a place now that he has become a de facto ambassador for the sport through his selection as a member of the 2017 NASCAR Hall of Fame class.
That got him to the track Saturday and Sunday, doing interviews as well as driving the pace car prior to the Coca-Cola 600.
Ironically, there was a time when it seemed as if Martin would never leave the garage. He was expected to retire after the 2006 season, his final full season at Roush Fenway Racing. But he then did a two-year deal starting in 2007 where he drove a partial schedule for Ginn Racing. Rick Hendrick twisted Martin's arm to get him back to full-time racing, and Martin drove three more full years at Hendrick, including his fifth runner-up finish in the standings in 2009.
Martin then did two part-time years, driving for Michael Waltrip Racing and then substituting for the injured Tony Stewart in 2013. But after that 19th-place finish in Homestead in 2013, he hasn't come back, though he watches races on television when he can.
"The racing has been incredible in 2016 -- bravo and hoorah," Martin said. "Since the mid-'90s I've been screaming you guys have been going the wrong way with this downforce. The racing is really, really getting better."
It just seems that Martin prefers to watch from home.
"Driver upon driver upon driver, each one that quit racing, you never heard from them again," Martin said about many of his friends who no longer go to races. "And there's a reason for that: because nothing really compares to what they did do. And it's hard for them to come to the racetrack when they don't feel like they have something to contribute."
Martin said one thing that isn't keep him from the track is the desire to get back in a race car.
"I'm cool with what's in my windshield," Martin said. "I don't miss driving race cars, but I have missed the people. The longer it's gone, the more I've missed. The last two months, I've really noticed I missed the fans, I missed the competitors, I missed the members of the media and journalists and all that were around the race track that were my family.
"I didn't feel like I had a place. When I drove a race car, there was a place for me here. I felt kind of awkward about attending a race being that I don't work on a car or drive a race car anymore."