Carts full of equipment and spare parts were loaded onto transporter trucks for the last long ride home. Vehicles were torn down, oil was returned to the recycling area, handshakes and well wishes were exchanged. On the frontstretch, Jimmie Johnson's latest championship celebration was winding down. Overhead, fireworks illuminated the night. In the garage area at Homestead-Miami Speedway, another NASCAR season was coming to a close.

But for the teams at Richard Childress Racing, the work was only getting started.

"We know where we're going, and we can see where we need to be. It's just a matter of building what it takes to get there," Todd Berrier, crew chief for driver Jeff Burton, said in South Florida on that night in late November. "We're going to be working like 7 to 7 over the winter to maintain what we've done over the last couple of months."

“

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.

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- KEVIN HARVICK

By now they are deep into those 12-hour days, trying to ensure the turnaround of a proud franchise that fell knee-deep into mediocrity last season. After placing three drivers in the Chase in 2007 and 2008, RCR struck out completely during a trying year in which Kevin Harvick announced his plans to leave after his contract expires, sponsor Jack Daniel's departed, and expansion to a fourth car didn't work out like anyone had hoped. It was all summed up by the results on the race track, downright galling to a program with six championships at NASCAR's highest level. A top points finish of 15th doesn't exactly cut it at RCR.

It all led to changes, among them a late-season management reorganization, a shuffle of crew chiefs, and changes in the way the team's cars were built. And over the final weeks of 2009, as Johnson seized the spotlight by running away to his record fourth consecutive championship, RCR at last began to show a pulse. Two cars in the top seven at Texas, two in the top seven at Phoenix, three in the top 11 at Homestead. No, the team didn't win a race, marking the first time RCR had gone winless at the Cup level since 2004. Yes, it was but a minor subplot in Johnson's march to history.

But RCR was also competitive, something it hadn't been for much of the season, and it all led to hopes for a return to the Chase in 2010.

"We've made up a lot of ground, but we can't take the approach going into [2010] that we've got it, you know what I mean? OK, we've got it figured out. Because I guarantee that our competition will be working really hard to be better, and if we bring the same stuff that we have here today to California, we won't run very well," said Burton, who placed 17th in final points. "So we've got to find a way to continue to improve, which is what we didn't do last year, and we have to be on full alert to not let that happen again. I think we made a lot of mistakes last year that we can learn from going into this coming year, and hopefully we don't make those same mistakes again. I don't think we will. I think that we'll be much smarter, and do the right things." (Continued)