<table> </table> TALLADEGA, Ala. | Mark Martin loves racing Sprint Cup cars more than anybody you have ever met. He loves it the way farmers love dirt and Wall Street loves money. He&#8217;d race for food and then give away the food.</p><p>Yet Martin is not at Talladega Superspeedway this weekend. He is not in the Cup car that he drove to top-six finishes at Dover, Richmond and Bristol in recent weeks. He has chosen not to drive today.</p><p>Talladega is just too weird these days, Martin will tell you.</p><p>From the sound of it, there are other drivers who would rather be sitting next to Martin on his couch than driving today.</p><p>And there is a sizable handful of drivers who believe that Talladega should not be host to a race in the NASCAR playoff known as the Chase for the Sprint Cup Championship.</p><p>With apologies to the fans, racing at Talladega, some in the garages say, is not really racing. It has become a freak show.</p><p>Talladega is the longest track on the schedule &#8212; 2.66 miles. And it has some of the steepest banking. Cars racing on it are required to use restrictor plates in an effort to keep them from hurtling into the grandstands.</p><p>The result of all that is high-speed, tightly bunched packs of cars inside of which drivers are in constant contact with their makers.</p><p>Drivers say that huge wrecks are inevitable and innocent bystanders are often the first to be collected.</p><p>For all those reasons, some say that the Chase is so important that its outcome should not be allowed to be affected by the capriciousness of &#8220;The &#8217;Dega.&#8221;</p><p>Carl Edwards is having a championship-caliber season. He has six victories, is second in the Chase and is just 10 points behind leader Jimmie Johnson. His consistency over the past 19 races has been remarkable as Edwards has finished in the top 10 of 16 of those events and in the top three of six of the last nine.</p><p>But he knows all of that could become pointless if another driver running inches away from him at about 200 mph this afternoon sneezes at the wrong time.</p><p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t think we ought to have a restrictor-plate race in the Chase,&#8221; Edwards said. &#8220;There&#8217;s just too much chance, you know what I mean? I feel that the champion ought to be the team and guy who perform the best, who do their job the best. I feel like these plate races leave too much to chance and not enough is in the hands of the teams competing.&#8221;</p><p>Johnson is not a plate racing fan when it comes to the Chase, either. And for the same reason as Edwards.</p><p>&#8220;I love Talladega,&#8221; Johnson said. &#8220;I think the spring race is a blast. I like Daytona (the other track which features plate racing). When you get in the Chase like this, it&#8217;s tough not to have that control.&#8221;</p><p>Chase driver Jeff Burton has no problem with Talladega. He said his opinion is that all types of tracks and conditions should be represented in the Chase.</p><p>&#8220;We run three regular-season superspeedway points-paying races so I believe it is fair to have one of these in the Chase,&#8221; Burton said.</p><p>Kevin Harvick, also a Chase driver, is on the other extreme. He said he actually enjoys the fact that teams and drivers have less control over the outcomes of races at Talladega.</p><p>The fact is, Talladega is in the Chase and teams and drivers are just going to have to deal with the fickle finger of fate today.</p><p>Because of that, a new strategy has been increasingly employed at Talladega and Daytona. Some drivers now purposely drop to the rear of the field for long periods of time in an effort to stay away from wrecks.