ESPN Sprint Cup

STATESVILLE, N.C. -- Jeremy Mayfield opened the rickety white gate behind the stone house at the bottom of the hill on his 478-acre lot and headed straight for Fred and Curtis, a pair of pygmy goats he got for his 39th birthday in May.

Fred was named after Fred Travis, a 73-year-old neighbor who has befriended the 16-year Sprint Cup veteran. Curtis was named after Mayfield, who is called that by close friends.

"It's totally redneck," said Shana Mayfield, looking like Eva Gabor on "Green Acres" in her long summer dress and sparkling silver sandals as she followed her husband to the goat pen.

Mayfield seems content on this sun-splashed afternoon. He has plenty of land to fish, target shoot and grow pumpkins larger than an engine block.

He has every kind of machinery on wheels -- from a paving machine to a dump truck to a street sweeper -- to assist in the countless projects that keep him busy on these rolling mounds of red clay in Catawba County.

He has a dirt track where he drives his Sprint Car so fast that the wheels barely touch the ground and a 13,000-square foot gutted structure close to the entrance of the property that he and Shana are remodeling into their dream home.

But inside Mayfield is miserable. Not the kind of miserable he felt going into the 26th race of the 2004 season, when he was 14th in the Cup standings, 55 points out of the top 10 that would make NASCAR's first playoff the following week.

That was a good kind of miserable, one that would turn into pure ecstasy after an improbable win at Richmond International Raceway propelled him all the way to ninth.

This is the kind of miserable he feels when he knows he has something left to prove and nobody will give him that chance.

"The hardest part is when you sit here and see there are other guys that don't have anything to offer and they have rides," Mayfield said as he leaned forward on a chair in the living room of his temporary home. "And there are several of them out there.

"Just to get one more chance … like that deal at Richmond when I got the opportunity to make the Chase, that's all I want."

Give him good equipment and Mayfield believes he can return to the form that got him into the Championship Chase in 2004 and 2005 at Gillett Evernham Motorsports.

So does Kenny Francis, who was Mayfield's team director at EMS for both of the Chase runs.

"This is a hard business," Francis said. "When people get down it's easy to say he can't do it. Heck, look at Jeff Gordon. He was down a few years ago and people said he should retire. There's a lot of examples of that if you look around."

Unfortunately for Mayfield, his phone is silent. His name is not on the short list of drivers to fill slots at Stewart-Haas Racing, Penske Racing, Joe Gibbs Racing and Richard Childress Racing.

It's not there even though his credentials -- five wins, 96 top-10s and two trips to the Chase -- are better than at least half the drivers in the current 43-car field.

He understands to a degree why he is being overlooked. He was fired at Penske Racing late in 2001 after taking too many shots at the organization, Rusty Wallace specifically, while trying to get out of his contract to sign with Gillett Evernham.

He was released at Gillett Evernham 22 races into the 2006 season after complaining publicly that owner Ray Evernham spent more time with developmental driver Erin Crocker than his struggling team. It really got ugly when he filed a lawsuit to block his release.

He landed at Bill Davis Racing in 2007, but departed late in the season with the team outside the top 35 in points and sponsor 360 OTC not paying bills needed to improve performance.

He finished 2007 at Haas CNC Racing and remained there seven races into this season before opting to leave with the team 36th in points.

"They had a bigger agenda with Stewart coming in," Shana said.

Mayfield stopped his wife before she could continue.

"I'm the first one to admit I've made mistakes," he said. "Whether it's the Ray's deal and I talked too much or what happened at Penske. … It was little stuff. Nothing big, but it all adds up and that's why I'm sitting here today."

Dog days
A low snoring sound coming from underneath the coffee table interrupted Mayfield's train of thought.

It was Izzie, one of three pugs and two bulldogs living in the house that appears to be a throwback to the 1970s with a shag carpet. There are half a dozen more dogs outside that somehow have found their way into the Mayfields' lives.

There are so many dogs that Mayfield allowed a family to move into the log cabin a few hundred yards away to help take care of them while he was racing. He can't wait for the day when he'll be away racing full time.

"You know what's amazing," Mayfield said. "You go through your career and you start doing good and everything starts going well for you and everything is perfect and you think you're on top of the world and no matter where you go you're going to run good.

"You think you can drive anything out there. Kyle Busch is thinking now he could step in the 34 car and win races. And he should."

Busch has seven wins in the Cup series and 14 between Cup, Nationwide and Trucks this season. Whether he could win in the No. 34, which has finished 35th or worse in the five races it has made this season, is another story.

That wasn't Mayfield's point. Never taking success for granted was.

"All of the sudden you wake up one day and it's like, 'Now I don't have good equipment to run in. Where did it all go?'" Mayfield said. "Then you start looking at how are you going to recover from this.

"Drivers need to realize that."

Mayfield doesn't know how he's going to recover from the two worst years of his career, made worse by his father's death in 2007. He hopes when everything shakes out there'll be an owner with decent equipment willing to give him a chance.

If not, he might start a Craftsman Truck Series team.

"I've got to make a decision somewhere down the line to do that," he said. "But once you make that move you know you probably won't be back in Cup."

And Mayfield wants to be back in Cup so badly that he's willing to work without a contract and for a percentage of his winnings without a guaranteed salary.

He'd love for that to be at Penske. He said leaving that organization was the worst mistake he's made, slightly ahead of losing his friendship with Evernham.

He recalled how team owner Roger Penske was the first person to come to his motorcoach and console him after he missed the Daytona 500 last season at BDR.

"On the day we parted ways he said, 'You never know what the future holds,'" Mayfield said.

It likely holds a driver other than Mayfield at Penske. Test driver David Stremme, Martin Truex Jr. and Casey Mears all have been rumored as candidates.

They have a combined two wins and 66 top-10s.

"I have been keeping up with everything," Mayfield said. "But it's different when I was used to being at the top of the list and all of a sudden you're not. When you're not in the mix of things it makes you stop and think, 'What went wrong?'"

Trader Mayfield
Mayfield pulled up his pickup next to the barn that has become his second home. He pointed to the nine tractor trailer haulers he purchased to refurbish and resell.

He then pointed inside one hauler still stacked with pallets full of items being discarded by stores that he purchased for resale.

"It looks like 'Sanford and Son' over there," said Shana, referring to the 1970s television sitcom about a junkyard owner and his son.

Mayfield has so much stuff that it has spilled into the house, forcing guests to stay in the motorcoach parked in the driveway instead of the spare bedrooms.

And while things appear in disarray, they help Mayfield keep his mind off racing and bring in money at the same time.

"I'm all about trying to buy something at a good price, fix it up and sell it," said Mayfield, who made enough money off his previous home that he was able to purchase this farm from former major leaguer Bryan Harvey. "That's all I think about. Trying to make it worth more than we paid for it."

Mayfield has so many projects going that he barely has time for sculpting metal art or building miniature race cars, hobbies he used to enjoy all the time.

One of his projects is trying to grow a pumpkin large enough to make Travis, who has grown watermelons over 100 pounds, envious. He's got a young one already the size of a bowling ball from seeds he found online guaranteed to grow the biggest pumpkins ever.

Whether it's driving a car or growing a pumpkin, Mayfield can't help but compete.

"We're going to put him back in a race car," Travis said. "If I have to buy one myself we're going to do it."

Trophy room
Mayfield glanced at the row of trophies on the mantel and hearth of the large stone fireplace. Among them was the one from his 2004 win at Richmond in which he seemingly defied all odds.

"That's the stuff you take for granted," he said. "Back then, I was pissed when I was 14th in points going into Richmond. We were miserable. We ran bad at California to put us in that position, but running bad then was when you finished 16th.

"Now I realize there's a whole new meaning of running bad and a whole new meaning of miserable."

Most counted Mayfield out of the Chase before that race -- his wife included.

"I remember Shana going, 'We're done. There is no way you can get in now. There is no way we can get to New York [for the banquet that includes the top 10],'" Mayfield recalled as he looked across the room at his wife.

Shana interrupted.

"I wasn't that bad," she said. "I was just trying to be realistic."

Mayfield's idea of reality was completely different. When a couple of crew members visited the house the Monday before Richmond, he emphatically said he'd win the race and make the Chase.

"I'll be damned, he did it," Shana said. "That's the only time he ever said we're going to win it."

Mayfield believes he can win again. He got a taste of what it was like to be in good equipment when he replaced the injured Dario Franchitti at Dover.

He qualified 10th and finished 25th for a team that since has been folded due to a lack of funds.

"I'm like, 'Damn, maybe I didn't forget how to do this,'" Mayfield said with a smile.

Former team director Francis never doubted that.

"I'd like to see him get another chance," he said. "I feel bad with what's happened. I sure wish he could get with somebody that would give him a good shot.

"I don't think he's been in stuff [the past two years] that can show what he can do."

Mayfield's problems at EMS began when Evernham moved Francis to Kasey Kahne's team in 2006 to help his rising star make the Chase. Mayfield had a hard time getting past that, feeling it was done at his expense.

"I just felt bad how it ended," Francis said. "The big thing with him is having a group of guys around him that has confidence in him. That in turn brings out his confidence.

"The thing I learned working with him for a few years [is] it's all about his confidence and everybody having confidence in him and believing in him. When we had a crew that believed in him he did very well."

Francis said Mayfield's run at Dover was "probably as good as that car has run all year."

Elliott Sadler, who replaced Mayfield in 2006, agreed.

"He definitely still has it," Sadler said. "He's a great guy, a great spokesperson, a clean-cut guy that sponsors should like. The way these cars are now a driver can't put it on his shoulder and cut it around the racetrack. You have to have a good surrounding team and a good support group around you. He definitely can get the job done with that."

Whether there's an owner out there who agrees is yet to be seen. Regardless, Mayfield has learned a lot about himself while sitting at home. He's been humbled in a way he never thought possible.

"I know I've made huge mistakes," he said. "I'm willing to admit that and get over that and get past that. Hopefully, there is a car owner out there that can look past that."

David Newton covers NASCAR for ESPN.com. He can be reached at dnewtonespn@aol.com. ESPN.com motorsports writer Terry Blount contributed to this report.