Mayfield sounded sincerely excited at Daytona back in January

I think we’ve discussed the whole issue of whether I have a "favorite" driver or not before, but in case I am wrong I’ll begin here with a quick review.
I pull for the best story. Good stories sell newspapers and get people to look at thatsracin.com, which is pretty much the whole point of what I do. They also make this job easier, and after the kind of day I had Monday getting back from Rochester, N.Y., to Charlotte (thanks a pants-load, Delta) anything that makes it easier is fine by me.
Having said that, I am a human being (despite what some of you might think!), so there are some guys you wind up developing better relationships with than others.
One of the guys that I’ve really come to enjoy talking to a great deal over the years is Jeremy Mayfield. I think he’s a good guy and a good racer, and it’s always nice to see somebody like that have success.
In January of this year at Daytona testing, I walked up to Jeremy in the garage and asked him if he was OK with the changes that car owner Ray Evernham had made to his No. 19 Dodge team.
Not only was he OK with it, Mayfield said, he was enthusiastic about it. He told me I’d be wrong, dead wrong, if I didn’t predict his team would make the Chase this year.
"I’ve got a better race team right now than I had last year," Mayfield said at Daytona in a news conference after he and I had talked. "…Look at average finishes, average starts, laps completed. We didn’t lead the most laps. We made the top 10 running like that. If we made the top 10 last year running like that, what’s going to happen this year if we get just a little bit better? That’s where we’re at.
"I understand what David said. Yeah, we switched teams and a lot of people are different, and this, that or another, but from my point of view it’s as good or better as it’s ever been. The 9 and 19 are closer than they’ve ever been. They’re working together. They’re helping each other. Our cars are the same. It’s a tight-knit group right now. …I know we’re quiet and don’t say a whole lot, but Ray Evernham and Dodge and myself and everybody on the 9 and 19 and 10 car, we’re going to win races and we’re going to be in the top 10 in points.
"I told David I just didn’t want to make him look bad. I’ve done it two years in a row and I can do it again. I’d hate to see you (speaking about me) picking odds at Vegas. If you worked out there you’d be in big trouble. I’m just joking, but I’m trying to make a point. We’re a better race team and this year we’ll show you."
Now, Jeremy is saying that he didn’t have any say-so in the changes that were made to his team late last year and that didn’t say anything bad about it earlier this year because he knew it wouldn’t do any good.
One thing about this job is that all I can do is go talk to people and ask them about what’s happening. Sometimes you know people are talking in code, but Mayfield seemed sincere in January and I bought it.
Maybe I was naïve, but I though he was really excited about his team and its chances. Or maybe he really was excited, and then got slapped with cold reality when the season started and things started to not work.
Mayfield’s fans are really upset right now at what’s happened to their driver at Evernham Motorsports. I get that. But when Mayfield spoke up at Chicagoland, questioning Evernham’s commitment to the team, he had to know there would be consequences from that. Mayfield says he wasn’t trying to get Evernham to cut him loose, that Evernham had already suggested Jeremy might want to check out his options before that. Whether that’s true or not, Mayfield is now out of the 19 car and free to look for another ride. It didn’t play out, perhaps, exactly the way he wanted it to, but in hindsight it has played out exactly like it was destined to do from way back in January, when all of that optimism was at best misguided and, at worst, delusional.