CUP: RCR’s Season On The Brink

Sprint Cup

CUP: RCR’s Season On The Brink

Kevin Harvick is third in points, best of the three RCR drivers...

Tom Jensen | Posted October 14, 2010 Concord, NC

Kevin Harvick is 77 points behind point leader Jimmie Johnson. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

It’s been a wild and turbulent season for Richard Childress Racing, which is looking for its first NASCAR Sprint Cup championship since the late Dale Earnhardt won his seventh title in 1994.

During NASCAR’s 26-race regular season, RCR engineered — figuratively and literally — a spectacular comeback after a dismal 2009 in which the team failed to put a single driver in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

This year, RCR turned it all around, as drivers Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer all made the Chase, with Harvick leading the points during the regular season.

Unfortunately for the team, winning the regular season points title doesn’t mean squat. The money is paid for winning the Chase, and so far in the Chase RCR has been at best erratic in the Chase.

Bowyer won the NASCAR playoff opener in New Hampshire and finished second last week in Southern California, but in between had two awful races and was docked 150 points by NASCAR when his car failed post-race inspection after the New Hampshire victory. He’s currently 12th of 12 drivers in the Chase, 247 back of leader Jimmie Johnson. Realistically, his title hopes already are over.

Burton, who has finished 15th or worse in three of the four Chase races is eighth in points, 177 in arrears of Johnson. For him to win the championship this season would take a whole lot of problems for the seven drivers in front of him and no more poor finishes of his own.

The RCR driver with the best chance of winning the Cup title is Harvick, who is 54 points back in third. But Charlotte Motor Speedway, site of Saturday night’s Bank of America 500, is one of Harvick’s worst tracks, a place he has led just 2 laps in 19 Cup races.

So the onus is on the entire squad to get going this weekend.

“Obviously, we’ve got our work cut out for us,” said Burton. “We’re not out of it, but we are approaching there if we don’t get something turned around really quickly. ... If we are going to make a charge, it has to start now. There is not enough time left to keep waiting for the charge to come. It’s got to come now. This is not the position I thought we would be in, but it’s the position we’re in. We’ve got to deal with it.”

For his part, Bowyer has relegated himself to the role of helping the entire team, not just doing his own thing.

“Well, certainly I want to be the best teammate I can be,” said Bowyer. “I wanted that championship to come home to RCR. ... Obviously you want it to be you, but obviously it’s looking like that is not going to happen so Kevin’s our best shot and Jeff’s (Burton) not out of the thing by any means and our cars are capable of getting the job done. Kevin has done a great job all year long of leading the championship points so I don’t think it’s a fluke that he is up front and in the running for it right now.”

So Bowyer said he’ll help out as much as he can.

The 150-point penalty NASCAR levied against Clint Bowyer likely ended any chance he had of becoming the 2010 Sprint Cup champion. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

“If we can continue our togetherness and work together through practices and things like that to hone in on a good package for Sunday then that is all it’s about,” Bowyer said. “That’s why you have multi-car teams so you can better your program for Sunday through practices, through qualifying and things. That’s what in my opinion if I can help him at all – our qualifying program has been better than Kevin’s pretty much all season long and we need to get him qualified better. He can’t continue to start back there and run with those guys that start up front. We have to be able to, as an organization, qualify better.”

For his part, Harvick said he expects it to be business as usual this weekend.

“Right now everything is going fairly well,” Harvick said Thursday at Charlotte Motor Speedway. “I think obviously there is always room for improvement. We've run well over the last couple of weeks. This will be a big weekend for us. Every weekend is a big weekend, so it's really nothing new. You've just got to go out and keep doing the things that you're doing and play your own game and see where it all falls at the end.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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Tom Jensen

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