| | POISED TO STRIKE | RCR coming off a good year, will 08 bring more success? | |
| | By Rea White / FOXSports.com Richard Childress Racing is coming off of a career season in which all three of the organization's drivers — Clint Bowyer, Jeff Burton and Kevin Harvick — earned spots in the championship-deciding Chase for the Nextel Cup.
Each driver won a Cup race, was in the championship battle and enters 2008 with hopes of improving on that performance. And why shouldn't they? RCR has completed its engine program merger with Dale Earnhardt Inc., and the new Earnhardt-Childress Racing Technologies is producing the engines for both teams. Under the tutelage of Richie Gilmore, the group is confident that horsepower will not be an issue this year.
The teams have a greater understanding of the car model formerly known as the Car of Tomorrow and how to get the best performance from it. Like all other NASCAR Sprint Cup Series teams, they got to tinker with it in the recently complete test at Daytona International Speedway and the upcoming sessions at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and California Speedway — all tracks that host races in the opening segment of the season.
The crew chief/driver combinations remain intact, and the trio seems only more intent on working together as a group. On the flipside, this is a group that saw a dip in performance in the closing months of last season — something they are intent on remedying this year.
Burton says that was, in part, due to the team putting so much into trying to learn about the new model while also competing with the old one. The team didn't get worse, it just watched as others got faster more quickly than it did.
He says that the team is behind at this point just because it is building all new cars, but that he feels good going into the year. With the building of new cars comes a bit more diversity between the models — building to each type of track than just working with one car in an effort to figure out the new model.
That's a good thing. So is the ability to focus on the new car instead of bouncing back and forth between models say the drivers.
"I think there at the beginning of the COT races last year, we used the same car for a while," Harvick says. "We have a lot of different cars now. I think the biggest thing I'm looking forward to this year is racing the same car week in and week out. ... It's just hard on the teams to run two completely full-time race teams. It's basically two teams within one team, and then you multiply that times three and it becomes a lot of work."
The key will be continuing to evolve with that car, to keep up with the competition as everyone learns more about this model, and finds ways to make it perform better. Having three teams that both get along and work together toward that goal could help RCR in that endeavor.
Burton, Harvick and Bowyer seem to genuinely like and respect one another. There doesn't seem to be any clash of egos, any inability to share information, or to understand what one another is working on in this organization.
That should make that process of evolution roll along more smoothly.
"I think if you get stuck in that rut, you're going to get behind," Harvick says. "You have to constantly evolve. I think that's what we always do is try to evaluate what we're doing and find that you have to get faster, you have to get better, you have to get stronger, but sometimes that's not done with your group at the racetrack, it's done internally at the shop and making sure that the way the shop function and the people function and the way you put your cars together.
"I guess the productiveness of the facility and the cars is as important as anything because it's hard to make all the races week in and week out because you race so much. So you have to have enough stuff to be able to put all that together, but you have to get ahead at the same time."
RCR not only needs to catch back up to where it was earlier in 2007, but also to the other teams that have made advances. Clearly, this group evolved in the off-season as well. Is it enough?
It will be a few weeks before RCR's drivers know the answer to that question. What is clear now is that the team understands the task at hand and take a realistic approach to gaining ground with this new car, and that the team is pleased with the progress it has made.
Making the next step, though, could be as difficult as gaining ground the last two seasons has been. The team has made its place among the elite in the sport. Time will tell if it still needs to gain a little more ground to catch the Hendrick Motorsports organization that pulled away from the field late last season.
Still, if the team is that close to reaching the top, that's not such a bad problem to have.
"The hardest thing that we do in our sport is knowing when to do something different, and then of course what to do different," Burton says. "It's really easy when you're not having success to look around and say, 'Golly, we need to do a lot different.' When you are having some success, it's much harder to change things. I mean, that's just common sense.
"So when you get to the point where you're having success and you're running well, how much do you change and what do you change? ... When you're running 20th, what do we need to change and how much do we need to change it? It's much more easy just to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and hope you hit it. When you're running well, it's hard to play pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey because now if you miss it, you go back to running bad again. So in many ways it's a harder step, but it's at the very least an equal step."
| | Posted January 19, 2008 , 7:44 am EST
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