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."

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.

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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."