LOUDON, N.H. - Hendrick Motorsports' Casey Mears says it's disappointing that he will not return to Hendrick Motorsports next season, but he remains committed to completing the season with a strong run for the team. Beyond that, he says he's just starting to investigate other job opportunities in the NASCAR Sprint Cup garage.

Mears and Hendrick Motorsports announced Friday morning that they would not continue their relationship beyond this season.

"We've put a ton of emphasis on the No. 5 program," team owner Rick Hendrick said in a news release. "It's been a total team effort, and Casey has worked as hard as anyone to help us improve. We've tested more than we ever have, but the results just haven't come.

Mears said there are no hard feelings, and he remains close to everyone at the Hendrick organization. He also said while he had expected to remain with the team next year, he's known for a couple of weeks that this would happen.

"Rick and I sat down and had a talk," he said Friday morning at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. "We didn't know exactly how things were going to play out so we haven't really jumped around at making any conclusions right away. But it's disappointing. I'd love to be there, obviously. Hendrick Motorsports is a great organization. We've definitely had a rough year, for probably several reasons, but everybody's worked hard. [Crew chief] Alan [Gustafson], Rick, myself, everybody's worked very hard to try to do what we can do to help improve the program and just haven't had the luck. [We] had some bad luck at the beginning of the year and had some bad runs to back it up. [It's] frustrating that we've had the start to the season that we had.

"Fortunately, it's kind of weird because we still have the second half of the year, everything's happened so early, but the big thing is I think obviously we've got a lot of potential still. I don't feel a whole lot differently about the team or the organization or the guys than I did [at] the beginning of the year. Obviously I feel like every week we have the opportunity to capitalize on a good finish and for some reason we've just really, really struggled. The team as a whole, then us, seemed to struggle a little bit more the first half of the season. It's unfortunate that things have kind of come out the way that they have, but, at the same time, things happen for a reason, and [I'm going to try to] just try to finish off the rest of this year as strong as we possibly can. … At this point it really doesn't do anybody any good to worry about what's going on and not focus on the remainder of the season, so we're just going to continue to work hard on that and see what happens for next season."

Mears didn't seem that comfortable with the timing of the announcement, which comes just 16 races into the season. Mears is 24th in the Cup standings with three top-10 finishes and one top-five this season. For the driver, this is the latest step in a series of recent moves. He spent four years at Chip Ganassi Racing, though he was moved to a different team within the organization his final season there. He joined Hendrick Motorsports' No. 25 team for 2007, then switched to the No. 5 with Gustafson for this year. It's been a while since the 30-year-old had a chance to really get his feet underneath him.

He was asked specifically if he was given enough time in the organization to develop and show his talent.

"I don't know a lot of the details of what's going on behind the scenes," Mears said. "Obviously because we have good relationships there at Hendrick Motorsports, I think Rick, out of everybody, wanted to see a multiple-year deal and see me get some consistency. I think people have made decisions because they've had to make decisions. I don't know why everything's gone down, that would probably be a better question for Rick. … He understands my situation more than anybody and that getting some stability would be good. Obviously decisions are made for certain reasons and I've said it's frustrating, but at the same time I can't control all those things."

The move came amid speculation that Mark Martin is moving to Hendrick to drive the car at least part time next season. The team statement regarding 2009 said only that plans for next season will be announced at a later date. Mears, meanwhile, is now being linked to the fourth Richard Childress Racing car. Would he be interested in that being his next career move?

"They're a great organization, obviously, and if that was an opportunity that would be great," he said. "As of right now, I'm just kind of putting the feelers out to everybody and just trying to see what exactly is out there and what the opportunities are. So far I've seen some really good opportunities, and if something like that was to develop, that would be a great opportunity."

Still, Mears is disappointed to be leaving Hendrick and frustrated by the opening to the season he's endured. He says it's difficult to point a finger at any one issue within the team, just that the group has had both some setbacks and some poor runs.

"That's probably one of the most difficult things for all of us, there's no real one place you can point the finger and say, 'Hey, this is bad.' I think if you did this with a lot of teams, if you analyzed how their whole season played out, you could look at four races right now that we wrecked out or just got into an issue that really wasn't our fault and we'd be sitting about 12th or 15th in the points right now and we probably wouldn't be having this conversation," he said. "We've struggled a little bit as a whole this year with the new car. It seemed like [Dale Earnhardt] Jr. and Jimmie [Johnson] kind of grabbed a hold of it a little bit better as far as those teams performing on a weekly basis. If you look at all of us, we've struggled at times. The races where we had good races going, unfortunately we had an issue. And it's made us look worse than we are this year.

"It's frustrating because of that reason. I don't think there's a hoax or a problem with the 5 team or anything that transferred over from the 25, it's just really some hard luck at the beginning of the year and we backed it up with some bad runs … The team's got a lot of potential."

And it has a lot of friends. Hendrick and Mears plan to finish the season together, though the driver admitted there could be potential scenarios that lead to a mutually agreed early separation. He doesn't have any of those in mind at this point, though, he just doesn't want to definitively rule out anything this early in the year.

Mainly, though, Mears wants to find a place where he can drive for a couple of years and gain some consistency. He's close to the people at Hendrick and says he doesn't expect that to change throughout this process, nor does he expect his team's performance to suffer because of the announcement. In fact, in an odd way, he thinks knowing this early that a change is afoot could help everyone involved as the season wears on.

""I'm really looking forward to finishing off the rest of the season strong. I know we can do that," he said. "Everybody's got a pretty positive attitude. It almost seems like now that people know kind of what's going on it's almost relaxed things even more and it almost seems like it's going to go better from here on out because the tension isn't there of wondering what's going to happen.

"So I see us having a strong second half of this year and hopefully from here on out get with a program where I can build a good couple of seasons in a row and really build something and go from there." - scenedaily.com