BRISTOL, Tenn. -- When the Sprint Cup Series visited Bristol Motor Speedway last spring, Richard Childress Racing ultimately ruled.

Drivers Jeff Burton, Kevin Harvick and Clint Bowyer finished 1-2-3 in what was the fifth race of a young 2008 season. Surely this was a harbinger of great things to come for a resurgent RCR, or at least so it seemed at the time.

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"We haven't put ourselves in position to win more. We haven't led enough laps. We haven't knocked off enough top-fives. We haven't done any of those things as well as we need to.

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JEFF BURTON

That has turned out not to be the case this season. The three cars fielded by RCR have combined to win just one more race in the five months since the Sprint Cup Series last visited Bristol. They returned there Friday to participate in qualifying and practice for Saturday night's Sharpie 500 at the half-mile track, hopeful that they can possibly rediscover the winning form the organization displayed earlier.

"We've got to get our attitude right, get set on kill, and go after 'em," said Bowyer, who owns RCR's only other victory this season, having won at Richmond on May 3.

After finishing third in the first race at Bristol this season, Bowyer sat ninth in points and used it as a springboard to eventually climb to as high as fourth. But coming into this second race of the season at the track, he's fallen into a tie for 13th with David Ragan and is in danger of failing to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.

Only three races remain before the cutoff for the Chase, which will include only the top 12 drivers in the standings. They then will battle it out for the championship over the season's final 10 races.

"You just got to make the best of this. We dug ourselves in this hole. I'm tired of being in it. Nobody likes it," Bowyer said. "Nobody is more proud of runnin' good than I am, and by no means have we lived up to our expectations and our potential. I know that, and I've been miserable.

"But I've got an opportunity in the next three races to make this Chase, and I've got to get my attitude right and make it happen. Being bummed out and being negative and pessimistic is not going to make it happen. I showed up here ready to go, and ready to fight."

Burton has much the same mentality. After winning the first Bristol race, he surged to fourth in points and eventually climbed all the way to first, holding the top spot in the standings for four consecutive weeks and remaining in the top two for 12 weeks in a row.

But with only one top-10 finish in the last nine races, he has fallen to fifth in points.

"Last time was an exciting race for us," Burton said. "We pretty much ran third to sixth all day. We had a competitive car and just kind of kept ourselves in position. Obviously we didn't win it by just brute force. We had some things go our way at the end [including leader Denny Hamlin encountering a fuel-pickup problem and a wreck involving Harvick and Tony Stewart].

"But we had a good car all day, and that's really how you win these races. You just want to put yourself in position where you have a chance at the end."

Sharpie 500

Race Lineup

Pos.	Driver	Speed
1.	Carl Edwards	121.860
2.	David Reutimann	121.175
3.	Jeff Gordon	121.121
4.	Regan Smith	121.083
5.	Bill Elliott	120.740
6.	Kevin Harvick	120.649
7.	Ken Schrader	120.634
8.	A.J. Allmendinger	120.588
9.	Kyle Busch	120.550
10.	Elliott Sadler	120.528

• Lineup | Videos | Photos

Despite Burton being the most consistent of the RCR drivers all year, he admitted that hasn't happened often enough in the days and weeks and months since the last RCR Bristol bash.

"We haven't put ourselves in position to win more," Burton said. "We haven't led enough laps. We haven't knocked off enough top-fives. We haven't done any of those things as well as we need to."

Harvick also has surged to as high as second in the standings this season before falling off. But he has been the hottest of the RCR trio of late with four top-10 finishes in the last five races, moving him from 13th to eighth in points.

Childress said he looks at where his drivers are in relation to everyone else and isn't discouraged.

"Just to be a contender for the Chase is pretty impressive in my mind," Childress said. "There are only about five cars looking pretty good, and we've got one of those. Beyond that, it's a pretty tight Chase.

"I think we've got some good races coming up. It's going to boil down to if any of those guys have bad luck. Even with Kevin Harvick and the couple of guys right in front of him, really from about six on back, it's really tight. So that's what it's going to boil down to. I feel really good about it."

Bowyer said that it hasn't been the short tracks such as Bristol that have caused him problems.

"Obviously it's the bigger tracks. At the mile-and-a-half tracks, we've been down on grip and we've been struggling. The mile-and-a-halves have traditionally been our bread-and-butter, and our times are down at them," Bowyer said.

He also admitted that off-track issues have served as distractions, at least for his team -- including speculation about RCR adding a fourth team, and contract talks that since have been settled between himself and RCR.

"It's been a lot of things that have happened," Bowyer said. "There was the contract, bringing in the new team and a lot of restructuring -- a lot of things going on in our organization that in the long run are really going to pay off for us. So I'm excited about all of it.

"You gotta see the light at the end of the tunnel, but first there has to be a light at the end of the tunnel. We know it's there and we're starting to see it. But the bottom line is we're working hard, and that hard work is going to pay off -- just like it did for us last year."

Last year Bowyer was the last driver who qualified for the Chase, but he won the Chase-opening race at New Hampshire and was the only driver to really push eventual champion Jimmie Johnson and runner-up Jeff Gordon before finishing third behind them.

"Once you've been there, it opens your eyes to so many things," Bowyer said. "You want to be there; you don't want to be the outside guy looking in. When you get a taste of that blood, you want more of it."

Also:
• RCR to name Mears fourth driver for 2009