At Richard Childress Racing, all the pieces seemed to be in place. After two years of qualifying three cars for NASCAR's year-end playoff system -- yet still left searching for that first championship since 1994 -- there was hope in the preseason that they could finally close the deal. There was a strong, stable driver lineup. There was a solid business sense that left RCR as one of the few major Sprint Cup organizations that didn't lay off anyone. And there was a fourth racing program, backed by another major sponsor, whose dollars just might put the team over the top.

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I think we've gotten a little behind in a lot of areas. ... I believe that one of the things that hurt us is not testing.

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JEFF BURTON

That was the hope, at least. The reality is something quite different.

RCR, one of the steadier organizations on NASCAR's premier level the past two seasons, is suddenly treading water. Jeff Burton is the team's only driver currently in Chase position, and he sits on the bubble in 12th place after a 26th-place result this past weekend in Michigan. Clint Bowyer, who opened the year so strong with his new No. 33 team, is in 16th. Casey Mears, added to the Childress stable this year, is in 21st. And perhaps most shocking off all, team standard-bearer Kevin Harvick is buried in 23rd after managing only two top-10s on the season to date.

What happened? This was an organization renowned for its reliability, with the three veteran RCR drivers traditionally among the series leaders in laps completed. The knock on them was that they couldn't lead laps and win races, something that set last year's trio of top title contenders apart from everyone else. These days, they've struggled in both categories. Burton still ranks second in laps completed, but his closest teammate is Harvick in 20th.

The top RCR driver in terms of laps led is Burton in 15th. While Harvick and Bowyer have clearly been hampered by some accidents, the team's overall performance has seen a clear movement in the wrong direction.

"I don't believe we're behind in one area. I think we've gotten a little behind in a lot of areas," Burton said. "One of the things that was clear to us coming into this year and last year, and I openly talked about it, is we were on the verge of not being good enough last year. We had one of two ways to go -- we could either improve, or we couldn't improve.

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"We worked very hard to improve, but we started the year out and the changes that we made we haven't improved. We were able to take that assessment really early, and now we're trying to do things differently and we're trying to get better during the year where some people got better during the winter. We just made some decisions that weren't ultimately the correct decisions. Wasn't because we weren't working, it wasn't because we weren't trying, but we just made some decisions that didn't work. Now we have to look at every department and try to figure out how to do every category better."

Childress said his team didn't loaf during the offseason. "Only two or three cars outran us regularly, and we did everything we could this winter to try and come back and beat everybody," he said. But with sanctioned testing banned because of economic reasons, many of those changes could be verified only on the simulator, and not on the race track. Burton said the testing regimen that RCR undertook after the 2007 season was one reason the organization as a whole was so strong last year.

"I believe that one of the things that hurt us is not testing," Burton said. " We tested a lot. [We] spent a lot of time testing, and I think that we got a lot of benefit out of that. We may not have been as prepared as a lot of teams without being able to test."

And then there's race-day strategy. Given how difficult it can be to overtake the leader in the current Sprint Cup, Childress said many teams have gambled on pit stops in order to improve track position. That's one thing RCR historically hasn't done, but may have to consider given its current situation.

"A lot of it is just making some choices on track position that got us at the end of the day," Childress said. "Track position is so big today, and you've got to gamble, and we've always been a pretty conservative company, and I think we're just going to have to gamble a little more on track position."

Meanwhile, the Chase now looms only 11 races away, and the possibility exists that no RCR driver will be in it. For now, Burton is hanging on, although he leads 13th-place David Reutimann by just three points and 14th-place Juan Montoya -- a past winner on the Infineon Raceway road course, which the circuit visits this week -- by 43. Bowyer is still in striking distance, 100 points out of Chase position. Mears, 287 points back, and Harvick, 349 out, are admittedly long shots at best.

"I feel good about Clint, for sure," Childress said. "The other two are going to take some really strong work and some luck and some good finishes. It's not out of the equation. But pretty soon, a couple of more races, if you're not back up within a couple of hundred points, it's pretty tough."