I just love the racing

Mark Martin has 40 Cup wins in his career but has yet to win a championship.

(Getty)

Editor's note: Each week of the 10-race Chase, Mark Martin will share his thoughts exclusively with Yahoo! Sports. Martin, 50, goes into Race No. 4 of the Chase as the points leader.

I've had a great week. I hung out in Arkansas, went over to my car dealership and just had a chance to get away from racing a little bit. It's been jam-packed since Richmond week, so it was a good diversion for me to be able to come here to California with a clear head.

There's really nowhere I can go outside the doors where I don't find enthused people cheering me on. It's sort of humbling. Everywhere I go I get it. It's nice that people care.

As far as the Chase goes, it's too early to try to call it. I can't worry about where Jimmie Johnson is on the track yet. It's too early for that. The time to start worrying about things like that is when you know that that could make a different. Right now, we don't know who is going to be the championship contenders yet. We'll find that out later on in the Chase. Jimmie may not be the guy to beat. I may not be the guy to beat.

Maybe after Martinsville we can talk about what the championship looks like. Everybody's trying to read too much into it after the first three races. When we get down to four to go, you can start to get a feel for what it's going to be about. Ten races is a lot of races.

To be honest, I'm just interested in the racing every week. I'm not interested in scoring points. I'm doing this because I love racing and I love winning. To me, winning races is more important than winning a championship. But that might not be the case for someone who hasn't had the good fortune to have won as many as I have. If you're only going to win a few races in your career, then you certainly would want and need to win a championship. But I've had the blessing of winning a lot of races, so I don't feel like I have to do anything more than what I've done to validate the career I've had.

NASCAR really shifted the focus from winning races to winning championships so that it could bring another dimension to our sport. At one time, it really was mostly about the race. And then NASCAR looked at it and said, "How can we bring more – more attention, more interest – to our sport?" So they started promoting the championship as being bigger than a race, and that's what it's become.

But there was a time when it was about each week's race as much as anything. I'm talking about in the '70s and '80s – certainly way before the Chase ever started. The Chase was just something to bring even another dimension of interest to it.

As for this weekend's race, I'm enthusiastic about it. I think we've won five times this year, so there's no reason why we can't come here and think that we might be able to do it again if everything works out.

I like California, but I'm not interested in doing anything other than racing. I'm a simple guy. I just like the racing.