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MARTINSVILLE, Va. — It’s a process, said Brian Scott, both for himself and the Richard Petty Motorsports organization.
One of five Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidates, Scott pilots the No. 44 Ford for RPM. He is 25th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series points standings after five races, and third in the rookie standings, trailing Chase Elliott (Hendrick Motorsports) and Ryan Blaney (Wood Brothers Racing).
“Right now, our motto is we’re stacking pennies,” Scott, 28, said Saturday morning at Martinsville Speedway, site of Sunday’s STP 500 (1 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). “It’s a motto that (crew chief) Chris Heroy shared with me. He’s like, ‘You’ve just got to keep stacking pennies until you make a dollar.’ And that’s what we’re doing. We’re taking small steps in the right direction.”
Scott and the team arrived at Martinsville this weekend on the heels of a season-best 12th-place finish at Auto Club Speedway. The result was especially pleasing given that it was the first “new” car rolled off the line for the No. 44 team.
RPM previously purchased vehicles from Roush Fenway Racing; last year the organization began building its own bodies; in ’16 a new in-house chassis-building program was put into place.
“We just didn’t start the season that way and we knew that we weren’t going to,” Scott said. “We got a late start with the deal coming together in December, we have a new crew chief … and it’s just taking some time to get all the parts and pieces and the cars and everything where we want them.
“But California was a huge step in the right direction with the people at Richard Petty Motorsports building some of their own chassis and doing a lot more of the stuff, and that was the first new car that we had run.”
The increased speed on the track is a reflection of that work. But again, it’s a process.
“Unfortunately, these new cars are extremely valuable possessions right now and we have limited numbers,” he said. “It’s important for us not to tear them up and to continue to not tear up the old cars when we have to run them because the rotation won’t allow … just give the shop opportunities to create more new cars and to start phasing out our old cars instead of having to fix and work on them.”
Team co-owner Richard Petty said the results after just five races might be somewhat similar to the 2015 season, but the improvement is there. The seven-time series champion and winner of 200 races said the RPM group is “just a wee bit better than we were last year.
“But we’re doing a lot of our own stuff and feel like we’ve got a lot better opportunity of improving over the year than what we did before because most of the time what we started the season with is what we wound up with,” Petty said. “Now, we can make our own changes with the body or the chassis or whatever the rules are, so it might not be there, but we’re going to have a better chance of our destiny being in our hands from the car standpoint.”
Scott’s teammate Aric Almirola is 13th in points with three finishes of 15th or better. He has three top-10 finishes in 14 career starts on the unique 0.526-mile layout and will start 20th Sunday.
Scott will start 26th. He posted two top-10 runs in the Camping World Truck Series at Martinsville, but Sunday’s race will be his first in a Sprint Cup entry.
“The short track program has been a sticky spot for Richard Petty Motorsports in the past with the exception of Bristol – they’ve run really well at Bristol and Dover,” Scott said. “But the short, flat track program is an area that they needed probably the most improvement out of all their programs. … I feel like that’s an area that bringing Chris (Heroy) in from another company has been helpful; it’s just that it takes time to implement new ideas and to get those things in place.”