At Richard Childress Racing, championships are in the blood. The museum at the team's race shop in Welcome, N.C., includes all six championship banners and owner's trophies amassed during Dale Earnhardt's glory years, along with an entire fleet of race-winning black No. 3 cars. Childress' old office, a wood-paneled nook where he signed Earnhardt to contracts and made many of the decisions that set his organization on a path to greatness, is sealed off by heavy glass. It's not difficult to find employees who have been with the company since the days when Cup titles seemed a birthright.

With the demise of Petty Enterprises, which late last year was absorbed by the former Gillett Evernham Motorsports, only one active Sprint Cup organization -- Hendrick Motorsports, with eight championships -- has accumulated more premier-series hardware than the team Childress founded in 1972. And yet it's been almost 15 years since RCR's last title on NASCAR's top level, which came when Earnhardt clinched his record-tying seventh championship in 1994. Since that time, RCR has won a Truck Series title. It's claimed four championships (three driver, one owner) on what's now the Nationwide circuit. But another Cup crown has been a long time coming. It feels almost overdue.

And everyone at RCR knows it.

"It's so competitive, it's so hard to put it all together and win championships," said Jeff Burton, who drives the team's No. 31 car. "But there's a bit of anxiety about taking that next step, and how do we take that next step. Because we haven't done it yet. Until we do it, we don't know that we can. So I don't want to say we're nervous, but we're anxious about it."

By any definition, RCR is a wildly successful franchise, with both a rich past and a flourishing present. Earnhardt's six titles cemented the team's legendary status. Although the Intimidator's fatal crash at Daytona in 2001 sent the organization reeling, it reorganized and rebounded a deeper team than ever. In each of the past two years, RCR placed all three of its drivers in the Chase. Childress replaced outgoing sponsors with new ones, no small feat in a tightening economy, and added a fourth car for this season. Entering Saturday night's event at Phoenix International Raceway, his top three drivers are all in the top 14 in points, and poised to make another multi-pronged attack on the seventh championship that's eluded the team for more than a decade.

"He still has the desire to win a championship, probably more now than ever," Mike Dillon, RCR's vice president for competition, said of Childress, also his father-in-law. "Look at the lineup of drivers we've got. We're going to win a championship before long. And he is the fire underneath us all. It's amazing to try and keep up with the man. I'm not blowing any smoke, that's the truth. ... We better [win a championship], or I'm going to have to be figuring what else I'm going to be doing around here. Because somebody else is going to be doing it. We're going to win. We've got to win a championship." (Continued)