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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: For Most, Next Year Is Here
The turnover at the crew chief position typically averages nearly 50 percent a year in the Sprint Cup garage...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted October 30, 2009   Talladega, AL
Crew Chief Pat Tryson will be leaving Kurt Busch and Penske Racing at the end of the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup race season. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

This time of year, there are two types of teams in the NASCAR Sprint Cup garage: A few racing for a championship and those already working on next season.

The teams that fall into the latter category are busy making changes to get right for 2010. So far, Pat Tryson has announced he’ll be leaving Kurt Busch and Penske Racing at the end of this season and moving to Michael Waltrip Racing, where next year he will lead the effort for Martin Truex Jr. and the new No. 56 MWR Toyota.

On Monday, Steve Addington was replaced as crew chief on Kyle Busch’s No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry. Busch and Addington have teamed up to win 12 Sprint Cup races since the start of 2008, second only to the 13 races Jimmie Johnson has won during the same period. And on Friday, Lance McGrew was confirmed as Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s crew chief for next season, the word “interim” being removed from his title.

Expect a flurry of additional announcements between now and the end of the year. The reason is as simple as simple gets: If you’re not racing for the 2009 championship, you might as well start racing for the 2010 title.

“The thinking of doing it now is that you get to try it,” said Carl Edwards of Roush Fenway Racing, a team that’s juggling its NASCAR Nationwide Series schedule. “There’s no better test session than the real world and there’s a lot of teams in position to do that.”

Still, it’s never easy making major changes.

The Addington move was perhaps the most shocking.

“Kyle’s talent brought a lot to this race team, but I think this race team [had] a lot to do with Kyle Busch winning 12 points races and one non-points race with the 150 at Daytona,” Addington told SceneDaily.com. “He was a piece of the puzzle that worked good with this group when he got here. When something like this goes down, you do think about what do you have to do because there’s a lot of teams in this garage area that would have had this past 18 months that we’ve had.”


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