Improvements in late 2009 give RCR hope for rebound (cont'd)

No question, the way RCR finished the 2009 season gives it a boost heading into the coming campaign, where the organization will debut with three cars -- the No. 07, formerly driven by Casey Mears, is on hiatus because of a lack of sponsorship -- in the Daytona 500 on Feb. 14. The team refined the way it built its race cars, making certain parts of the vehicles lighter and other parts stiffer, focusing on tweaking the small areas allowed within NASCAR's limited technological box. Former crew chief Scott Miller took over the competition department, and oversaw an effort that bore tangible fruit over the final weeks of the 2009. It may have looked like it happened overnight, he said, but it didn't.

“

It's a constant evolution progress in the garage. We got behind that curve. We got caught up, and now we've got to stay caught up and try to get ahead of the curve.

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- SCOTT MILLER

"I think it's one of these deals where, the end result looks like it came together quickly, but the end result is something we've been working toward all year," Miller said. "Fortunately, the last couple of months to the season, we started to see some of the benefits of some of the things we started working on six months ago. It really didn't happen fast. It appeared that way, like we flipped a switch. But we didn't. It's actually things we've been working on for quite a while that finally started to open some new doors for different things to try. We just got better."

Still, the transformation was evident. A perfect example is Burton, who failed to crack the top 10 for 18 consecutive weeks, and then finished the season with four straight results of ninth or better. Clint Bowyer, whose 15th-place points finish was RCR's best last year, finished 12th or better in six of his final seven starts. Even Harvick, who suffered through one of the worst seasons of his career and said he would leave the team after 2010, saw some rays of light in the form of three top-10s in his final five races.

All this from an organization that was stunningly dreadful at points last season, a team which got caught up in too many crashes and racked up too many finishes in the 20s and 30s before the changes began to take effect. Now the goal is to build on those small strides, to make those 12-hour work shifts count, to avoid another prolonged slump of the kind RCR has become too familiar with over the past decade.

"The biggest thing is, we just can't sit on our hands. We have to push forward," Harvick said. "You have to figure stuff out. We figured a lot of stuff out in a short amount of time while we're still trying to race, and that's hard. I would assume that they have a good plan [for] the offseason as far as the things that we need to work on. And the biggest thing it comes down to is, the depth of your cars and your fleet. We've been building these cars, and we don't have a lot of them, and we've figured some stuff out suspension-wise, so we've just got to keep pushing forward. You've got to get ahead, and once you get ahead, you can't stop. You've got to keep pushing."

Can that push get RCR back into the Chase? This is, after all, an organization that once defined championship-level consistency, a team that finished laps and finished races and put multiple cars in the playoff for two years running, even if it lacked the more impressive win totals of some of its competitors. Were the improvements on display in late 2009 enough to give Richard Childress Racing confidence that it can get back to the Chase in 2010?

"That's certainly what we expect, and that's certainly what we're working toward," Miller said. "But the 48 car won the championship, and I'm sure they're not running the exact same car they started [last] year with. It's a constant evolution progress in the garage. We got behind that curve. We got caught up, and now we've got to stay caught up and try to get ahead of the curve."