Insider's View: Kevin Harvick

As many of you know, we've not been running quite as well as we'd have liked so far this year. It's not for lack of effort, surely, but our finishes just haven't been what we'd hoped for so far.

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So after Darlington, Richard Childress made the decision to reunite myself and Todd Berrier, my Busch Series crew chief and the guy who led us to the Busch championship in 2001, and move Gil Martin over to team manager.

I think the biggest reason behind Richard's decision was that Gil was just overloaded. There was just too much for him to do. There was the whole managerial side of it alongside the actual racing side.

Unless you're really educated on what these guys have to do, it's impossible to understand just how much responsibility that is. It's a tremendous amount.

And we're working so hard to get our racecars better right now that it's going to take a concentrated effort all the time. So we decided to bring Todd back in and see if that will help us make up some ground where we're lacking right now.

From SI.com  Richard Childress' three Winston Cup drivers have earned their paychecks during the first five races of 2003. It just hasn't been at the front of the pack.

Todd and I have had success before. I think Gil's going to do all the same things he has been doing, and Todd's going to concentrate on racing and those racecars. It should be good in every way, and Richard was pretty adamant about doing it. So we did it.

There's a comfort level with Todd. Gil and I had a good comfort level, too, but Todd and I have had so much success together on the racetrack, in competition.

Gil was a part of that success, too, on the Busch side, and those guys are going to work now just like they did then.

They counterbalance each other. Todd's very aggressive and takes a lot of risks, while Gil is more conservative and laid back. So those two can really make for a great combination.

This decision is one of those deals where you achieve comfort right off the bat, because of our past successes in this format. We've got a good bunch of guys who have worked with Todd before, too.

And obviously there's a lot of different feelings and emotions that everyone goes through when a decision like this is necessary.

But it's going to be better for our race team. I'm confident of that, and we need to raise the performance of this team.

I think there's a performance issue for all our Winston Cup cars right now. We're a little bit behind on the bodies, the balance of the bodies that you have to have to compete.

That's going to require extra time and effort from everybody, so Richard made the call and we went with it.

We want to stay in the middle of the top-10 and the championship race, and in order to do that we can't continue losing ground. We can't waste any time.