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."

Yet even RCR's drivers will admit the team has struggled to catch up to the Hendrick juggernaut, which has won the past three championships with driver Jimmie Johnson. Although the RCR cars have been renowned for their reliability -- Burton, Kevin Harvick and Clint Bowyer are traditionally among the series leaders in percentage of laps completed, and Harvick had an 81-race DNF streak snapped earlier this year at Fontana -- race wins are a different story. Johnson, Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards seized control of the Sprint Cup race last season by each recording multiple wins, a feat the RCR drivers found difficult to match. Burton won twice last year, Bowyer once. Harvick, driver of the team's flagship No. 29 car, hasn't won since his Daytona 500 victory to start the 2007 season.

Laps Led Leaders

2008 Season

Pos.	Driver	Led	Wins
1.	J. Johnson	1,959	7
2.	Ky. Busch	1,673	8
3.	C. Edwards	1,282	9
4.	Dale Jr.	896	1
5.	D. Hamlin	766	1
11.	K. Harvick	192	0
12.	C. Bowyer	188	1
16.	J. Burton	140	2

Last year, none of the RCR drivers finished better than 11th in percentage of laps led, a statistic in which the three top championship contenders held the top three spots. Among the RCR drivers this season, only Burton stands better than 15th. It seems like a simple solution -- for the RCR drivers to seriously contend for the championship, they need to lead more laps and contend for more race wins. Toward that end, Dillon said the team placed an offseason premium on finding ways to squeeze more grip out of the notoriously loose Cup chassis.

It's not an overnight fix. But it's not a complete overhaul, either.

"This isn't a thing where one group is messed up, one person messed up. This is a thing where our company is a little bit behind. We aren't miles behind. We are a little behind. We have to catch up in all areas. We have to be a little better in all areas," Burton said.

"I think it weighs on Richard when we're not competitive. It really bothers Richard when we're not competitive. But I think Richard's also realistic. Who would have walked in here three years ago and said, you guys would be making Chases? It didn't look anything like that. Today, a lot of people are assuming we'll be in the Chase. We don't, we know that's a lot of work ahead of us. [But] that's a big difference."

Harvick believes it's just a matter of fine-tuning.

"I think we all have been around long enough to know that if you try to force it, it's only going to make it worse. I think the experience level kind of tames most of that. You know, in '06 we were close, in '03 we were close. In '07, Clint had a shot. Last year we had all three cars in [the Chase], the last few years we've had a couple in. It's one of those deals where we're like right there, and we just need that last little bit to push us over the edge," he said.

"It's a whole lot easier to tear one of these teams apart than it is to put it together again. In order to get that last little bit, in order to go out and beat a 48[car of Johnson] ... it's everything, from myself to [crew chief] Todd [Berrier], to the cars, to everything in between. It just needs that much. We're not rebuilding cars and looking for a miracle here like we were at the end of 2004. We're not having to start over, We're having to fine-tune, and that comes from every department."

Indeed, the RCR franchise has come a long way from 2004, when Childress's best driver finished 14th in points, and the organization went winless for only the second time since 1983. "We did that by improving every single area of our company," said Burton, who witnessed the transformation firsthand. "There was no one thing we were doing wrong. We isolated, defined, made accountable people in every department. When we did that, guess what happened? So we're having to redo that again. It's constant. We've always been doing it. But we've just got to be a little better in all areas."

The results of that effort will determine whether the RCR drivers can challenge Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and the other top contenders this season, and end the organization's 14-year-old championship drought. But as they well know, the window of opportunity stays open for only so long.

"You can't always be building, building, building," Burton said. "There comes a time when the rubber meets the road and you have to win a championship, and we haven't done that yet. There's some anxiety about that, no question."