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.

Look at Jeff Gordon, whose crew chief Robbie Loomis resigned after the driver of the No. 24 car missed the Chase in 2005. An unknown named Steve Letarte stepped in, led Gordon to a phenomenal 2006 season -- even if they didn't win the championship -- and has his driver back in the points lead this year. Look at Rusty Wallace, who hooked up with Robin Pemberton after Buddy Parrott resigned following the 1995 season. They were together for 230 races, one of the longest driver/crew chief relationships in modern NASCAR history. Look at the way Kurt Busch responded to Jimmy Fennig. Look at the way Mark Martin responded to Pat Tryson. Although it may seem so to the desperate citizens of Junior Nation, what's happening to the younger Earnhardt is far from unique.

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"This was a situation we felt needed to happen, and we couldn't wait until the end of the year," Hendrick said. "It wasn't fair to our sponsors, to our fans, and those two guys [Earnhardt and Eury] to keep doing nothing."

And yet, in the case of the No. 88 car, there's no obvious heir apparent, perhaps one reason why Hendrick has chosen this multi-faceted approach. Given that McGrew was already scheduled to work Dover this weekend with driver Brad Keselowski, Whitesell -- who won a race on an interim basis with Gordon after Ray Evernham stepped down, and was the architect of the juggernaut No. 48 team -- will be calling the shots on the No. 88 car this week, with McGrew taking over at Pocono. Overseeing it all will be Stump, one of Hendrick's little-known but invaluable engineering aces, the man Gordon's infamous "T-Rex" car was named after.

"Right now, we've got one boat with a hole in it, and we've got to fix it," Hendrick said. "So his efforts are going to be there."

As for a long-term solution, who knows. The car owner is throwing a lot of people at the No. 88 problem, but didn't rule out eventually bringing in someone from the outside. "Lance and Junior, or Brian and Junior, may be magic," Hendrick said. "But we're going to keep all our options open."

And in the meanwhile, there's Eury, who helped the No. 88 program get off to a fast start early last year, but wasn't able to sustain it. Hendrick speaks of Eury with almost a fatherly tenderness, understandable given their long personal history. Robert Gee, maternal grandfather to both Eury and Earnhardt, was a legendary fabricator and former Hendrick Motorsports employee who helped the eight-time champion get into racing. The first NASCAR race Eury ever attended was a then-Busch event at Road Atlanta, along with Gee and Hendrick. Strangely, those personal ties might have made Thursday's announcement a little easier for everyone involved.

"Tony knows when I told him I wanted him to be with this company, he knows that I'm not just saying that, and that I care about him a lot. If it wasn't for his granddad, I probably wouldn't be in this business. I think the world of him, and he's a very smart guy. He can be a contributor to our organization," Hendrick said.

"Tony is part of the family, and he will always have a job with me as long as I'm racing if he wants it. And he says he does. He's very good in this [research and development] area, he likes this area. There's no pressure on him, and I'm excited about seeing him smile and laugh and be Tony again."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.