Casey Mears scored his maiden Nextel Cup Series win in Sunday's marathon Coca Cola 600, surviving a near six-hour race of attrition to eventually win thanks to his superior fuel mileage.
After a terrible start to his career with Hendrick Motorsports that had left Mears and the #25 National Guard team teetering on the brink of the top 35 in owner points going into Sunday's 12th round of the 2007 season, the nephew of quadruple Indy 500 winner Rick Mears wrote another Memorial Day weekend chapter in his families storied racing history and potentially saved his career with NASCAR's most successful team.
While the longest race of the NASCAR season wasn't dogged by the type of tyre, track surface and fuel cell issues that have turned the last three Coke 600's into something of a farce, the 400 lap thrash around the intensely difficult 1.5-mile Lowe's Motor Speedway more than lived up to its reputation as one of the toughest tests of endurance of the entire year. Although the final 60 laps ran under green flag conditions, which led to Mears' crafty fuel gamble, the preceding 340 tours included 13 cautions and several multi-car crashes that thinned the field considerably and resulted in just 23 of the 43 starters finishing with ten laps of the winner.
With 15 drivers trading the lead no less than 29 times between them there were at least half a dozen contenders who would be excused for thinking that the race was theirs for the taking but a combination of crashes and mechanical attrition left many of the pre-race favourites sitting on the sidelines long before the chequered flag finally waved.
Polesitter Ryan Newman, his Penske Racing teammate Kurt Busch, triple Coke 600 winner Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt Jr, Kyle Busch and even the
Red Bull Toyota of Brian Vickers all enjoyed periods where their cars were the strongest but with the ever-changing track conditions fortunes ebbed and flowed constantly.
![Casey Mears. [Pic Credit Streeter Lecka/Getty Images]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/190203.jpg)
