PHOENIX -- Of all the regular drivers on the Winston Cup circuit, Mark Martin would be considered one of the series' biggest pragmatists.

He's a deep thinker, likes to ponder before answering questions, and brings a professorial approach to everything he does. He's part analyst, part soothsayer, part prophet and part father figure.

But most importantly, the driver of the No. 6 Ford is a realist. As he prepares for Sunday's Checker Auto Parts 500 at Phoenix International Raceway, Martin isn't one to give flowery answers when asked about his chances to catch Tony Stewart for the championship in the season's last two races.

He knows he left Rockingham, N.C., last Sunday 87 points behind Stewart. One day later, Martin had suddenly slipped to 112 points back after NASCAR penalized him, owner Jack Roush and crew chief Ben Leslie for an unapproved spring used at the Rock. Thus far, there's been very little out of the Roush Racing camp on whether the penalty will be appealed.

"I can't comment on the appeal part and my comment on what's fair and not fair is a tough and delicate situation," Martin said. "Obviously, it wasn't something that we had worked on. It wasn't a part that we had altered to try and gain a competitive advantage ... where we did something or built something trying to slip something by. That was never the question. ... It was just the way it was manufactured."

Leslie is also reluctant to speak about whether the team will appeal the penalty.

"I really don't know," Leslie said. "That's probably more of a question for (team president) Geoff Smith or somebody like that, or even Jack. I'm not sure what their take is on all of it as far as what they want to do. I'm just worried about going to Phoenix and Homestead, to be honest with you."

Yet, at the same time, Leslie feels the team may have been taken to task for what was an honest mistake, namely, using a set of springs that were off-the-shelf and had not been as closely scrutinized before being placed on Martin's car as they normally would have been.

"I think (being penalized is) all relative to where you're sitting," Leslie said. "If you're sitting however many points that we are behind the 20 car, yeah, it's unfair to take points. ... That's all in what perspective you're taking it from and I'd rather not pass any judgment on that because I'll be biased."

Being penalized only made Martin's task of trying to catch Stewart that much harder, but the veteran won't sugarcoat what he has to do. Rather, Martin tells it like it is.

"However I answer that question won't feel exactly right to me," Martin said when asked about his chances of catching Stewart. "If I answer it with the word 'slim,' then I feel that it might be misinterpreted as some kind of lack of desire or giving up or relinquishing the fight and that's not accurate.

"But, we are behind and we've got to continue to have great performances like we had last week at Rockingham. In order to win the thing, Tony's got to continue to have performances like he had at Rockingham or worse. We'll see. Racing deals everybody blows at different times. We've received our blows and so has Tony and so have all the guys behind us that are trying to catch us. To be honest with you, I'm real thankful to be contending because I wasn't even contending for a top-10 position last year. I've been blessed with a tremendous season."

	Mark Martin finished second at Rockingham last weekend.

Martin won't get many arguments about that last statement. He has put together his best season in four years. And while most media attention has been focused on other drivers such as Stewart, Ryan Newman, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Sterling Marlin, Martin has motored along quietly and effectively.

And for a guy who doesn't necessarily believe in luck, Martin foresees Sunday's race as ultimately becoming a matter of good luck and bad luck -- good luck for him and bad luck for Stewart.

"A little bit of both," he said. "We look at every week with the intent to make every possible effort to win, so we've done that week in and week out. It's easy to forget that a year ago we were racing for 12th in the points and right now we're racing for first or second."

Yet, at the same time, Martin bristles whenever he's asked why no driver has been able to take a commanding lead this season. He has especially grown weary of questions such as "Doesn't anyone want to win this thing?" He calls those "poor descriptions" of what has arguably been one of the most exciting championship chases in history.

"I understand that's only a set of words that someone threw on top of it because they didn't know how else to describe it, but that's obscene," Martin said. "This has been a year when no one could get away -- no one could break out and get away and the reason for that is two things. Racing is determined sometimes by coincidence and, secondly, it's by design -- NASCAR's design. This is what they want.

"For any given team to win -- I think Gordon won 13 in '98 and I won seven and we finished first and second in the points -- I don't know that that will happen again in NASCAR. If it does, it would surprise me."

Martin would be closer to Stewart heading into this weekend's race not only if it wasn't for the penalty received this week, but the three-race sequence from Kansas to Charlotte recently where mechanical problems forced him to consecutive finishes of 25th, 30th and 16th. That string knocked him out of the points lead and back to third, before he climbed back into second two races ago.

"That took some of the wind out of our sail," Martin said. "We've done everything that we can do all year to minimize those things and we just had a little rash of those kind of things and that happens to everybody. There's always a possibility of the same thing happening to our competition."

With that said, Martin and Leslie come to Phoenix with a simple plan: to run their own race and hope Stewart makes a mistake.

"We approach (Phoenix) like we did at Rockingham, we unload, try to sit on the pole and win the race," Leslie said, knowing that Martin has enjoyed considerable success at PIR, including a win in 1993. "We're hoping to come out of Phoenix with a real good run. Not to put too fine of a point on it, we just want to get everything that's coming to us this weekend and try to come out of there with a top-five. If we find ourselves in a position like we were (at Rockingham), maybe we can try to come out of there with a win."

Martin agrees with his young crew chief.

"We're going to Phoenix with at least as much optimism as we went into Rockingham," he said. "That was a spectacular effort by the whole team to go in there and qualify fifth, which is one of the very few top-five qualifying efforts of the year for us, and to get second in the pit crew competition on Saturday, and then to lead the most laps and contend for the win in the closing laps Sunday was almost everything you could do."

Whether or not Roush or Smith decide to appeal the penalty, Martin intends on going forward at Phoenix. He's not going to dwell on what might have been, or whether the penalty winds up costing him the championship. He'd rather focus on what he can still do; what remains within his control.

"I've been racing for 28 years or something like that," Martin said. "Over that period of time I've developed some tools or skills for survival. In order to be successful at anything as competitive as this is, you have to be really, really thick-skinned and you have to be tough or you won't ever survive -- you will never make it to this level. With that said, it doesn't mean that I don't bleed because I do, but I do the best I can with it."

Jerry Bonkowski covers NASCAR for ESPN.com.