This time, Childress hopes to expand the right way

BROOKLYN, Mich. -- Richard Childress knew the question was coming, so he decided to answer it before it was even asked.

"A lot of people have asked, why four teams? Why are you going back to four teams? That's a question I knew we'd get, so I figured we'd get that one out of the way," the six-time championship car owner said Friday at Michigan International Speedway. "We felt like right now was a really good time to do it. We had it in 2009, that wasn't any effect on our performance. We're going to do this team completely different than we did that one."

Sound Off: RCR

Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton weigh in with their thoughts about adding Paul Menard to the team in 2011.

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Richard Childress Racing announced earlier this week that it will expand to four cars for the 2011 season, with driver Paul Menard moving over from Richard Petty Motorsports. RCR's last experiment with four cars coincided with the organization's worst campaign in years, a winless 2009 season in which the team failed to place any of its cars in the year-end Chase. Since contracting back to three, RCR has righted the ship, with all of its drivers in title contention and Kevin Harvick leading the points.

Yet RCR believes the struggles of 2009 -- when the team went winless for the first time in five years, and none of its drivers placed higher than 15th in the standings -- had less to do with the number of cars and more to do with flaws within the organization, which Childress addressed with a reorganization that centered around moving former crew chief Scott Miller to competition director, and led to improved performances in the final weeks of 2009.

"Richard sat down with all of us individually and asked our opinions and thoughts and got the sign-off from everybody," Harvick said. "He always does that, even though he doesn't need to do that. You look at the situation of how each team is structured, it's very simple: Scott's going to go in and say, you need this many people, we need to add this person to the fab shop, you need to add this many people to the paint shop, and it's a very simple equation, which is not how it was structured before. But as far as the performance of the cars, you look at the last eight weeks of the season last year, and all four cars ran great. It wasn't a number issue. It wasn't a four-car team issue we had last year. It was slow cars we had last year. Once the cars got fast, all four teams ran fine."

Still, the contrast in performance was a stark one. With three cars in 2008, RCR won three races and placed all three drivers in the Chase for a second consecutive season. Things began to fall apart after the organization added Casey Mears in a fourth car for 2009. And yet, even in those good years, there were hints -- most notably, the inability to lead laps and contend more often for race wins -- that RCR wasn't keeping up quite as well as the top teams on the Cup level, issues that eventually compounded and took their toll. And that fourth car went away not because RCR dropped it, but because sponsor Jack Daniel's pulled out of the sport.

Still, even Menard seemed to have questions at first. "As far as the fourth team, that's a question I had for Richard -- how's it going to work this time?" said Menard, currently 23rd in points. "The answer I got was, the fourth team really had no bearing on their performance last year. They really upped their engineering game, and got their cars improved over the winter, and there's no reason why a fourth team won't work."

If anything, RCR's drivers believe that expanding to a fourth car magnified issues that were already in place with three. Childress thinks those issues have been resolved, something the results of this year would seem to back up, even if RCR continues to lag behind championship rivals Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing in terms of race victories. (Continued)