CUP: RCR Throwing Nine Teams At Three Series

Sprint Cup

CUP: RCR Throwing Nine Teams At Three Series

Team owner Richard Childress lost one Cup team but will field a total of nine throughout NASCAR’s major series…

Mike Hembree | Posted January 25, 2012 Welcome, NC

Richard Childress Racing’s team vice president Mike Dillon confers with Jeff Burton, an RCR driver likely to vie for the Chase. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

The NASCAR economy continues to be battered in many precincts, but it seems to be spinning rather nicely at Richard Childress Racing.

Although RCR dropped from four Sprint Cup teams to three for the coming season, everything else at one of the sport’s biggest operations is bursting like spring flowers.

A web of sponsors and associate sponsors is supporting a nine-car RCR operation – three Sprint Cup, three Nationwide and three Camping World Truck teams. And there will be a 10th team for at least the first five races of the Cup season, with Elliott Sadler starting the Daytona 500 in the No. 33 car and Brendan Gaughan driving it in the next four (to take advantage of the guaranteed starting spot for those events).

The bottom line, in a sport in which some teams have shuttered and others have cut employees, is that RCR expanded its payroll over the off-season. The RCR core operation now employs about 400, and Earnhardt Childress Racing Engines employs about 120.

Team vice president Mike Dillon, son-in-law of team owner Richard Childress, is responsible for 293 of the employees as czar of the competition department.

Does he know all their first names?

“I know them by what they make,” Dillon said with a smile. “I can tell you what every one of them makes.”

Dillon has been shuffling budget sheets for the past two months, making all the numbers work.

“We’ve got a special group of people working here now,” Dillon said. “It’s going to be a lot of fun if we can keep it together for the next four to five years.”

In the works is a new organizational chart, because somebody has to know where everybody is at any given moment.

The obvious focus of the RCR effort will be winning the team’s first Sprint Cup championship since Dale Earnhardt scored his seventh in 1994. Pursuing that title will be Jeff Burton, Kevin Harvick and Paul Menard, and all three figure to have a reasonable shot at making the Chase.

Harvick made it last season but finished third for the second consecutive year.

Harvick will start 2012 with extra incentive. He announced at a media function at the shop Wednesday night that his wife, DeLana, is 14 weeks pregnant with the couple’s first child, explaining in part, Harvick said, why they decided to sell their Nationwide and Truck teams last year.

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Mike Hembree

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