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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Doubling Down In Denver
Furniture Row Racing likes doing it their way...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted February 02, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Furniture Row Racing inherited the owner points from the shuttered No. 07 Richard Childress Racing team, guaranteeing them a start in the first five races of the season. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Joe Garone runs a Sprint Cup team based in a beautiful but unlikely location – Denver, Colo.

Barney Visser, the team’s owner, and his business empire, Furniture Row, also are Denver-based, so it was logical for Visser to want his motorsports hobby/business to be nearby. Some questioned if a team so far from the sport’s epicenter in Charlotte, N.C., could be successful. Garone, the team’s general manager, hopes to prove the affirmative this season.

After running only 18 races last season, Furniture Row Racing hopes to go full-time this season with driver Regan Smith. The team got numerous boosts in the off-season, including a new alliance with Richard Childress Racing that provides two benefits – technical support and the owner points earned by the Casey Mears car last season. The points swap automatically qualifies Smith for the new season’s opening races, and that’s a benefit almost beyond measure.

“It’s up to us after that, but having that is huge,” Garone said. “We’re going to be protected from that aspect, and that should help us stay in the top 35 after the first five races. Plus, we align ourselves with one of the Chevrolet partner teams so that we can get more support from Chevrolet and from a bigger team.”

Despite the distance difficulties that are obvious (RCR is based in Welcome, N.C.), Garone anticipates sharing testing and technical data with the RCR teams.

“It helps us get on the same platform with another team so we can compare notes,” he said. “That’s something we’ve been struggling with. We like being a single-car team because we can go our own way, but we also needed somebody to collaborate with.”

Visser’s decision to re-energize the team after losing personnel and race dates in the past year resulted in 20 new employees joining Furniture Row in the offseason, boosting the shop payroll to 60. Among the newcomers are crew chief Ryan Coniam (replacing Jay Guy, who moved on to a crew chief position with driver Brad Keselowski at Penske Racing), car chief Pete Rondeau, managing director of competition Mark McArdle and engineers Cole Pearn and Josh Browne.

The changes have Smith fired up.

“The new people, the RCR alliance, plus an already strong foundation bring a new spirit, and it’s all great,” he said. “I’ve never been this pumped prior to the start of the season. And to know that we don’t have to go through the gut-wrenching qualifying process – especially at Daytona – is an incredible relief.”

Garone said Smith “is ecstatic about where we’re headed and how things are shaping up. He was on a bigger team at DEI, but he didn’t have their total focus. With us, he has 60 people focusing directly on Regan Smith and giving him the absolute best cars we can produce.”
The pit crew for Furniture Row driver Regan Smith will be employed and trained by Stewart-Haas Racing. (Photo: LAT Photographic)


Garone said it’s realistic to expect the team to compete for a top-25 points position this year.

“The industry knows the people we’ve added” he said. “These people are used to running up there, and they know what it takes to get there. We think we have a driver who can do it.”

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com and has been covering motorsports for 28 years. He has written several books on NASCAR, including "NASCAR: The Definitive History of America's Sport" and "Then Tony Said To Junior: The Best NASCAR Stories Ever Told". He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.


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