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Sprint Cup
JENSEN: Plenty Of Achievers In 2010
The 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup season produced at least five notable overachievers...
SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)
One of the best parts about going back through the stats and taking a look at the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup season is realizing just how much people accomplished in a single year.
Here’s one man’s list of overachievers for 2010, in no particular order:
Scott Miller, competition director, Richard Childress Racing — Reversing the direction of a floundering team is like trying to turn a battleship around, but that’s exactly was Miller was charged with when Richard Childress promoted him to competition director at RCR. The 2009 campaign was an abysmal one for the once-proud team, failing to put any of its four cars in the Chase for the Sprint Cup or even win a single race.
With five races left in the 2009 season, Miller was kicked upstairs and asked by Childress to turn the ship 180 degrees around. Amazingly, he and his minions did just that, winning five races, the regular-season points championship and nearly seeing Kevin Harvick knock off Jimmie Johnson as all three RCR cars were in the Chase this year.
Surely Miller would be the first to tell you he didn’t do it alone, that it was the hard work of all 500 or so RCR employees that made the difference. True enough. But he was the one asked to make it happen and it happened. So he gets the gold star as the architect of a great season.
AJ Allmendinger, driver, Richard Petty Motorsports — The philosopher Dante once described hell as having nine circles. Near as I can tell the First (Limbo), Fourth (Greed), Fifth (Anger), Sixth (Heresy), Eighth (Fraud) and Ninth (Treachery) circles pretty much describe the combination of the Gillett family’s management style and the mood of the rank-and-file crew people at Richard Petty Motorsports, who had more crap heaped on them than anyone deserves.
In the middle of this festering cauldron of ruin, Allmendinger would have been forgiven if he had quit on the team. But at the end of the season, when the team literally didn’t know if it would be at the track week to week, he got up on the wheel in a big way.
During the final 10 races of the season, The ‘Dinger qualified sixth or better five times and had five finishes of at least 12th, including a fifth at the season-ending race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. He finished a career-best 19th in points and made his team and sponsors proud. It was a classy performance under trying circumstances.
Joey Logano, driver, Joe Gibbs Racing — In his second full season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, the bullies came after Logano. He got roughed up repeatedly by several drivers, including Harvick, Greg Biffle and Juan Pablo Montoya. It was a difficult position to be in when you’re just 20 years old and behind the wheel of one of the most iconic cars in the Cup Series.
But Logano manned up and gave as good as he got, not taking any undue abuse from anyone. He needed to put his Big Boy Pants on and did just that. Considering that just three years earlier he was a teenager short-track racing, that was a bold step up.
He finished the year strong, too: In the last 11 races of the season, Logano had two DNFs for crashes; in the other nine races, his average finish was 6.67. That bodes well for his chances in 2011.
Jack Roush, co-owner, Roush Fenway Racing — Midway through the NASCAR Sprint Cup season, the 68-year-old Roush survived his second airplane crash, this one resulting in the loss of his left eye and a broken back.
And yet, he spearheaded a second-half performance revival with his team that saw Carl Edwards win the last two races of the season to finish fourth in the final points standings, just ahead of his Roush Fenway Racing teammates Matt Kenseth and Biffle.
If you can find a man in the Sprint Cup garage who, pound for pound, is tougher or more resilient than Roush, I’d like to meet him.
Tony Stewart, co-owner/driver Stewart-Haas Racing — Yes, Stewart made it to the Chase for the Sprint Cup as the driver of the No. 14 SHR Chevrolet for the second consecutive year. But where he really deserves the accolades is as an owner.
He brought in an all-new sponsor this year, frozen-food maker Tornados, which was on Ryan Newman’s car when it won at Phoenix in April. When Old Spice announced that it wouldn’t be back as a sponsor in 2011, Stewart was able to land Mobil 1, quite a feather in his cap for a second-year team owner.
Yes, he still occasionally has a short fuse and doesn’t suffer fools and their questions gladly, but he’s a rising star on the ownership side of the business — and that’s not even counting his lengthy resume of philanthropic work.
We’ll talk more about these and other accomplishments in the days and weeks ahead; for now, suffice to say that there are still plenty of overachievers in NASCAR, something the aforementioned five proved every week at the track in 2010.
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.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
Here’s one man’s list of overachievers for 2010, in no particular order:
Scott Miller, competition director, Richard Childress Racing — Reversing the direction of a floundering team is like trying to turn a battleship around, but that’s exactly was Miller was charged with when Richard Childress promoted him to competition director at RCR. The 2009 campaign was an abysmal one for the once-proud team, failing to put any of its four cars in the Chase for the Sprint Cup or even win a single race.
With five races left in the 2009 season, Miller was kicked upstairs and asked by Childress to turn the ship 180 degrees around. Amazingly, he and his minions did just that, winning five races, the regular-season points championship and nearly seeing Kevin Harvick knock off Jimmie Johnson as all three RCR cars were in the Chase this year.
Surely Miller would be the first to tell you he didn’t do it alone, that it was the hard work of all 500 or so RCR employees that made the difference. True enough. But he was the one asked to make it happen and it happened. So he gets the gold star as the architect of a great season.
AJ Allmendinger, driver, Richard Petty Motorsports — The philosopher Dante once described hell as having nine circles. Near as I can tell the First (Limbo), Fourth (Greed), Fifth (Anger), Sixth (Heresy), Eighth (Fraud) and Ninth (Treachery) circles pretty much describe the combination of the Gillett family’s management style and the mood of the rank-and-file crew people at Richard Petty Motorsports, who had more crap heaped on them than anyone deserves.
In the middle of this festering cauldron of ruin, Allmendinger would have been forgiven if he had quit on the team. But at the end of the season, when the team literally didn’t know if it would be at the track week to week, he got up on the wheel in a big way.
During the final 10 races of the season, The ‘Dinger qualified sixth or better five times and had five finishes of at least 12th, including a fifth at the season-ending race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. He finished a career-best 19th in points and made his team and sponsors proud. It was a classy performance under trying circumstances.
Joey Logano, driver, Joe Gibbs Racing — In his second full season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, the bullies came after Logano. He got roughed up repeatedly by several drivers, including Harvick, Greg Biffle and Juan Pablo Montoya. It was a difficult position to be in when you’re just 20 years old and behind the wheel of one of the most iconic cars in the Cup Series.
But Logano manned up and gave as good as he got, not taking any undue abuse from anyone. He needed to put his Big Boy Pants on and did just that. Considering that just three years earlier he was a teenager short-track racing, that was a bold step up.
He finished the year strong, too: In the last 11 races of the season, Logano had two DNFs for crashes; in the other nine races, his average finish was 6.67. That bodes well for his chances in 2011.
Jack Roush, co-owner, Roush Fenway Racing — Midway through the NASCAR Sprint Cup season, the 68-year-old Roush survived his second airplane crash, this one resulting in the loss of his left eye and a broken back.
And yet, he spearheaded a second-half performance revival with his team that saw Carl Edwards win the last two races of the season to finish fourth in the final points standings, just ahead of his Roush Fenway Racing teammates Matt Kenseth and Biffle.
If you can find a man in the Sprint Cup garage who, pound for pound, is tougher or more resilient than Roush, I’d like to meet him.
Tony Stewart, co-owner/driver Stewart-Haas Racing — Yes, Stewart made it to the Chase for the Sprint Cup as the driver of the No. 14 SHR Chevrolet for the second consecutive year. But where he really deserves the accolades is as an owner.
He brought in an all-new sponsor this year, frozen-food maker Tornados, which was on Ryan Newman’s car when it won at Phoenix in April. When Old Spice announced that it wouldn’t be back as a sponsor in 2011, Stewart was able to land Mobil 1, quite a feather in his cap for a second-year team owner.
Yes, he still occasionally has a short fuse and doesn’t suffer fools and their questions gladly, but he’s a rising star on the ownership side of the business — and that’s not even counting his lengthy resume of philanthropic work.
We’ll talk more about these and other accomplishments in the days and weeks ahead; for now, suffice to say that there are still plenty of overachievers in NASCAR, something the aforementioned five proved every week at the track in 2010.
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.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED
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