Why are we so surprised?

Tony Eury Jr. was replaced as Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s crew chief on Thursday, and the reverberations are still being felt from Lowe's Motor Speedway to Las Vegas. After a 40th-place result in Monday's rain-delayed Coca-Cola 600 that sank NASCAR's most popular driver to 19th in Sprint Cup Series points, team owner Rick Hendrick reassigned Eury to a research and development role and brought in a full cadre of replacements to try to turn around the No. 88 car. General manager Brian Whitesell, interim crew chief Lance McGrew and chassis specialist Rex Stump comprise a brain trust whose singular focus will be getting Earnhardt back into contention for the Chase. (read more)

"We are pulling out all the stops to get this team to where it needs to be," Hendrick said.

Understandable, given Earnhardt's high profile, his high-dollar car sponsors, and the sometimes suffocating pressure that goes along with his immense popularity. But it shouldn't come as a shock. The crew chief change is the most elementary of all NASCAR fixes, a tried-and-true method of jump-starting an otherwise struggling program, something most top drivers experience at one point or another in their careers. Not everyone is Richard Petty, able to compete for three decades with the same crew chief -- Dale Inman, in this case -- on his box. Drive long enough, and it's almost bound to happen. But when it happens to Earnhardt and Eury, it feels like breaking up the Beatles.

There's a reason for that, of course. Junior and Junior came to Hendrick as a package deal, cousins who lived to race together, who sniped at one another over the radio, who seemed as intrinsically tied together as Goodyear and rubber. In some capacity, they had worked alongside one another on the same race program for all but one year since breaking into NASCAR's top series with Dale Earnhardt Inc. in 2000. When Earnhardt made the decision to jump to Hendrick prior to last year, Eury came over first, laying the groundwork for the No. 88 program in the final few months of 2007. Their relationship, full of feuds and reconciliations and deep family history, became part of the sport's culture.

All of which makes the breakup -- and in a sport as competitive and as constantly changing as NASCAR, there are always breakups -- that much more dramatic and noteworthy, as evidenced by the hour Hendrick spent on a conference call with reporters Thursday explaining the reasons behind the change. And yet, it shouldn't have come as a surprise. Drivers much more successful than Earnhardt Jr. have found themselves in this exact situation, and many of them have benefited from the results. All you have to do is look at Earnhardt's father to see the kind of positive outcome that such a change can yield.

Dale Earnhardt had won seven championships, and even recently snapped his historic drought in the Daytona 500, but still found himself mired in 12th in points midway through the 1998 season. Given that there was no Chase, that position was equivalent to about 25th today. People were saying that the Intimidator was finished. So car owner Richard Childress shook up things, swapping Earnhardt's crew chief, Larry McReynolds, with Kevin Hamlin, who had worked on teammate Mike Skinner's car. Earnhardt went on to win five more times during the next two years, and at 49 even contended for an eighth championship in 2000. Who knows what else Earnhardt and Hamlin might have accomplished had one fateful day at Daytona not intervened. (Continued)