Darian Grubb was let go from his post as Tony Stewart's crew chief at the end of the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season. (Photo: Getty Images)
The most obvious preseason goal of every competitive Sprint Cup team is to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup and thus earn a shot at the seasonal championship.
Simply making the Chase is no guarantee of a banner season, however. In fact, it’s not even a guarantee of future employment.
Three cases in point – crew chiefs Darian Grubb, Gil Martin and Mike Ford.
All Grubb did last season was win the Sprint Cup championship. Yet, a few days after the sparkle of champagne died down in Las Vegas, Grubb was out the door at Stewart-Haas Racing, having been told earlier in the Chase by team co-owner and driver Tony Stewart that he wouldn’t be retained for 2012.
That’s a very unusual – and relatively outlandish – example, of course, but it illustrates the topic. Success doesn’t always mean comfort.
Martin (Kevin Harvick) and Ford (Denny Hamlin) also put their teams in the Chase last year, but neither returns to their respective positions for 2012.
Shane Wilson replaced Martin in an in-house move at Richard Childress Racing, and Ford was replaced at Joe Gibbs Racing by Grubb.
It’s a fact of life at the top levels of NASCAR that it’s much easier to replace crew chiefs than drivers, even when it’s not necessarily evident that the crew chief is the “problem”. And it’s also true that, even with top-flight individuals filling both the driver’s seat and the war-wagon hot seat, sometimes the chemistry just isn’t there.
So champion Stewart, third-place Harvick and ninth-place Hamlin will roll into 2012 with new “offensive coordinators”. Steve Addington moved over from Penske Racing to replace Grubb.
There perhaps will be more interest in how the Hamlin-Grubb pairing fares than that of Stewart and Addington. Grubb picked up a big sympathy vote near the end of the season when it was revealed that he was on the way out at SHR despite steering the ship as Stewart rallied to win the title.
Grubb will be out to prove that the late-season run was no fluke and that he can produce big-time results with another driver.
For Grubb and Wilson, the missions are clear – lead two drivers who might have been expected to win titles by now to the promised land.
Addington will be trying to repeat Stewart’s championship and win what would be a first for the crew chief, who has previously worked with volatile brothers Kyle and Kurt Busch (Stewart, of course, being no shrinking violet himself).
It’s all part of the continuing carousel that is Sprint Cup racing.
Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
