Mark Martin has said people shouldn't handicap NASCAR's Chase For The Sprint Cup until after the race next week at Talladega Superspeedway because of the chances of the field getting shuffled by a major wreck.

But Martin admits he's lost a lot of ground the last two weeks with finishes of 17th at Lowe's Motor Speedway last week and then eighth Sunday at Martinsville Speedway. He went from 12 points behind Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson with six races remaining to now being 118 points behind leader Johnson with four races to go.

Martin has held onto second in the points, though, with a 32-point edge on teammate Jeff Gordon and a 74-point cushion on Stewart-Haas Racing's Tony Stewart in fourth.

"After next week, we'll know for sure, but we certainly don't look as good as we did two weeks ago," Martin said. "We were really looking good two weeks ago, and we've lost points for two weeks. We didn't give them away. We got beat. With the kind of performance the 48 [of Johnson] is putting up, it's just pretty incredible.

"It's pretty incredible to expect to beat that. I think that we're holding our own very well against the rest of the Chase guys."

Johnson has an average finish of third in the six Chase races.

"What are you going to do when the leader's average finish is [that high]," Martin crew chief Alan Gustafson said. "If ... you need to make up points on him, I'm thinking you're going to need to win. That's pretty self-explanatory."

Martin ran in the top five most of the day at Martinsville but got shuffled back to eighth during a 138-lap green-flag run that ended on lap 444. Martin then couldn't gain any ground during the final 57 laps.

"The guys that beat us turned the center and got off the corner," Martin said. "We spun the tires all day. We could turn the center, but we couldn't get off the corner and we couldn't fix that. So we earned everything that we could get today.

"We raced as hard as we could. We had the one long run and lost a few spots toward the end of that run and obviously we weren't good enough to recover from that. We got shuffled out of the top five. I'm very satisfied with the effort. We gave it our all, and we got beat by a few and we beat a few. If we could have led the most laps and won, we sure would have. We gave it our all, and therefore, I'm satisfied."

Gustafson wasn't satisfied, but he wasn't disappointed.

"I'm not happy, but we're not there right now," Gustafson said. "We're working hard, and we just haven't been able to do it. We've just got to find some places to get better. It's going to be tough, but that's what we're going to have to do.

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"I'm not disappointed, and I'm not looking around thinking we shot ourselves in the foot here. The cars drive pretty good and the pit stops are really good and the strategy has been good, but it just hasn't been good enough. So we've got to find some more."

Martin's season has been incredible if not a little inconsistent. He was 34th in points just four races into the season but he rattled off four wins to crack the top 12 and make the Chase. He then opened the 10-race, title-determining segment of the season with a win at New Hampshire.

"I don't want having an incredible year cause us to be disappointed by not scoring more points than everybody in the thing," the 50-year-old Martin said. "We will win it if it's meant to be. But if it's not, we won't. We're giving it everything we've got."

Bob Pockrass is a staff writer at NASCAR Scene. For more racing news, visit SceneDaily.com.

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