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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
JENSEN: Time To Face The Music
Steve Letarte and Dale Earnhardt Jr. have got it going on. Others don’t ...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted April 11, 2011   Charlotte, NC
SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)
The 26-race NASCAR Sprint Cup regular season reached its one-quarter-distance point Saturday night at Texas Motor Speedway, where Matt Kenseth scored a dominating victory to break a 77-race losing streak.

So far this year, the Cup teams have raced at a 2.5-mile restrictor-plate track, a 2-mile oval, two 1.5-mile high-banked ovals, a 1-mile flat track, a 0.533-mile high-banked short track and a 0.526-mile flat track. Basically, the series has run representative samples of everything but a road course.

By this point in the season, I guarantee you every single team out there has a good sense of where they are vs. the competition and their own expectations.

The numbers are there in black and white, showing who’s improved a lot in 2011 and who’s fallen off.

The most improved driver in terms of points so far this year is none other than Dale Earnhardt Jr., who last year finished 21st in points but now is sixth, a gain of 15 spots.

By the same token, Paul Menard is up 12 spots and is having a great season, while Juan Pablo Montoya has improved nine positions from the end of 2010 and Ryan Newman has gone up eight. That’s good news for all of them.

On the other side of the coin, you have some dramatic drop offs: Denny Hamlin, last year’s championship runner-up, is 20th in points. Jeff Burton has slid all the way from 12th to 25th, Joey Logano has tumbled 12 positions, Jamie McMurray 10 and David Reutimann nine. All five of these drivers and their respective teams have had hugely disappointing seasons to date. Not saying it’s the drivers’ faults, but the numbers are ugly.

Which brings us to this week’s race at Talladega Superspeedway.

Historically, this is the time when teams that are underperforming make changes.

You may recall that it was this time two years ago when Richard Childress Racing swapped entire crews between Kevin Harvick and Casey Mears. At the same time, the now-defunct Hall of Fame Racing made a crew chief change for Bobby Labonte. Prior to the first Talladega race in 2008, team owner Chip Ganassi switched crew chiefs for his two drivers, moving Jimmy Elledge over to work with Montoya and Donnie Wingo to Reed Sorenson’s car.

Why now?

There have been enough races on enough different tracks for teams to evaluate where they are. And it’s early enough in the season to fix problems, or at least improve them dramatically.

There are lots of reasons teams and drivers struggle — everything from mechanical failures and getting caught in wrecks, to wrestling with setups and strategy. There’s no single explanation that neatly summarizes the woes of each driver or team. Every situation is unique.

That said, there is a common denominator.

When a team underperforms, it’s generally the crew chief who takes the brunt of the blame. Part of it is because that’s his job. The crew chief is the place where the buck stops for performance.

The other issue, though, is sponsorship. These days sponsors have a tremendous amount of influence in driver selection to begin with. And they spend literally millions of dollars creating advertising and promotional materials around the drivers: Television commercials, print and Internet advertising, cardboard stand-ups for grocery stores, diecasts, back packs, lunch boxes, t-shirts — the list goes on and on and on.

All those goodies feature the likenesses and/or the names of the drivers. You almost never see a team selling crew chief merchandise, not even if that crew chief is a rock star. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Chad Knaus t-shirt or a Bob Osborne sweatshirt.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. (Left) and crew chief Steve Letarte (Right) are making solid gains in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series 2011 season. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

When a team — any team — isn’t running well, the crew chief gets replaced because replacing him doesn’t instantly make a sponsor’s entire marketing program obsolete the way a new driver would. That’s a big reason why crew chief turnover runs between 40 percent and 50 percent annually.

That’s also why I think you’ll see at least one high-profile crew chief replacement this week. It might be two guys trading jobs on the same team, it might be someone new coming in from the outside, but for the teams who are underperforming, the clock is ticking.

And my educated guess is it’ll hit midnight before practice starts at Talladega on Friday.

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.
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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