Win provides answers, adds pressure for 07 team

At the risk of wrongly portraying Sunday's Sylvania 300 as anti-climactic, it was obvious early and often that the race was Clint Bowyer's to lose. The moment the green flag dropped, Bowyer put the drop on the field. Nobody had anything for him all race long. From the center off of every turn of the race, the 07 car either put distance between him and second place, or in the handful of laps when he was not in the lead, he made up ground on the car ahead.

It was an utterly dominant performance. How dominant? Bowyer's Driver Rating for Sunday was 150 points out of a possible 150 points. He lead 222 of 300 laps. His average running position was 1.57. His lowest running position was 11th place. Including pit stops, he was passed for position only 12 times.

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That's a pants-down, open-hand spanking. And it couldn't have come at a better time for the team.

In the pressure cooker that is Nextel Cup racing, the 07 team had been taking heat from all sides leading up to Sunday's race. Critics were questioning whether the team even belonged in the Chase with no wins to its credit.

Within every organization, there is pressure to perform. RCR is no exception. In the 07 team's case, that meant measuring up to the performance standards established by the 31 and 29 teams. Then there's the pressure of delivering to Jack Daniel's the promise and exposure of all that potential.

Perhaps the greatest pressure of all was the pressure of their own expectations. Last week's crash while contending for the win at Richmond weighed especially heavily on everyone on the team. "I rode my motorcycle back from Richmond, which took five or six hours, and I thought about that mistake. It's just fuel for the fire," Bowyer said.

Sunday night, Bowyer's crew chief Gil Martin acknowledged taking that incident to heart as well.

"We should have been a little bit more in his ear at that race in Richmond because he had a good car, just like what we had [Sunday], and we just let him run a little too hard right there," Martin said. "We've made that mistake before in the past -- watching his lap times versus everybody else -- and I think we also learned a little bit from it, too. We won't make that mistake [again] either."

As if that wasn't enough pressure on the team, the press is always there to add a little of their own. All season long, the media have been asking the same questions: When will you win your first race? And, do you think you have a shot at actually winning the championship without winning a race?

The weekly inquiries may have gotten old, but even Bowyer admits that the questions were legitimate.

"You ask yourself the same question every time you get close and you make a mistake and come up a little bit short," Bowyer said on Sunday. "But it's definitely frustrating. But it is what it is. And they were right. We hadn't won a race. We were the only ones in the Chase that hadn't. But we can't say that anymore."

Despite the misstep at Richmond, the team's approach to the Chase and the reason for Sunday's success is the product of months of planning and preparation that began with RCR's early commitment to developing their Car of Tomorrow programs. By the time the spring Bristol and Martinsville races were in the record books, it was obvious they were onto something. Since then, they've taken that knowledge and applied it to a new generation of chassis that, after a good deal of on-track development, made their racing debut over the weekend.

Said Martin, "This is a car that we just built. We built it for these last 10 races actually, for the COT races. Not that we've been holding back, we had some things we wanted to try that we weren't for sure how they were going to work out."

While other teams were throwing caution to the wind in an effort to accumulate maximum bonus points for the Chase, the 07 team played its hand close to the vest.

"We didn't want to take that gamble leading into the Chase because this was the big picture [just] getting there. Now that we're here, I think some of the things we've wanted to try -- we've wanted to implement throughout the last three or four races -- we were able to put into the car now," Martin said. "I think that's the same with the engine program and everything else. Anybody who has been around Richard knows that his conservative approach about everything that we do ends up paying off in the long run. You have to really be able to look at the big picture to be able to go down that path."

With no bonus points in their war chest, and a 60-point deficit to make up as the Chase began, the 07 team had to do something to establish itself as a bona-fide championship contender. And that it did. Sunday's dominant win vaults Bowyer to fourth place, only 15 points off of the lead. Imagine the confidence the team will bring to Dover.

For all its good, Sunday's win won't take any pressure off the team. The crew may no longer have to answer for their lack of wins, but they'll now have to shoulder an even more daunting task: the pressure of winning a championship that is truly within their grasp. A challenge I'm sure they're happy to take on.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

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