Richard Childress' shakeup doesn't appear to be working...so what next?

  
Richard Childress: A lot of questions, but so far no good answers (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  
  

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

    BROOKLYN, Mich.
    So what the heck has gone wrong over at Richard Childress' this spring?
    Last fall when Jeff Burton won Charlotte, he was on the charge toward the NASCAR championship.
    But since that high point, the Childress camp has hit too many potholes.
    Consider Kevin Harvick – He's been Childress' top driver for several years, and he's got one of the biggest sponsors in this sport, in Shell-Pennzoil. But Harvick is mired 26th in the standings, a whopping 691 points behind tour leader Tony Stewart. Aside from that second at Daytona and fourth at Atlanta, his season has been all but a disaster.
   And this is apparently the final year of the Shell contract, meaning Childress will likely have to negotiate.
   Hence the crew chief shakeup a couple months ago.
   However that shakeup doesn't seem to have made much difference. In fact, Harvick seems almost to have done a nosedive since.
   Now Harvick has been hit with word from General Motors that it's pulling its factory support from his own Truck/Nationwide operation.
   Teammate Jeff Burton – 10th in the standings and the only Childress driver who looks like he'll make the championship playoff cut -- can sympathize, with both Harvick and Childress: "There comes a time when things just aren't working, and someone has to make the decision and say 'Okay, they are not working.'
   "Every team, every business has its ups and downs, and you have to have all the information to make the decision of when to make the change or to see it through. 
    "I've been in those situations where it wasn't going to get better and something had to change. 
    "And I have been in situations where it wasn't going well and I totally was convinced that sticking it out was the best thing to do, and I was right.  I've also been wrong about those things too.  
   "At the end of the day, the pros and cons are that you judge them by the results. 
    "And if the changes yield better results, then you lean back and say it was better. And if not, you look back and say it wasn't the right thing to do.
    "My father-in-law is a physician, and one of the things that is interesting about medicine is that if you treat someone and they get better, then that person believes that they got better because they were treated. 
   "But if you didn't treat them at all, they might have gotten better too…and then that person wouldn't think the medicine is what made them better.
   "When you make a change, you don't know what the result was going to be if you hadn't made that change. 
    "You only know what happened after you did it."
   
   Okay, then, let's consider this car-of-tomorrow/today thing. Is that part of the problem? It certainly doesn't seem to be part of any solution to low TV ratings.
   Burton is leery of change: "If the car is changed at all, I don't think the car should be changed drastically. 
    "If NASCAR believes if the cars drive a little better that it would produce better racing, then I would support that. 
    "The fact that the cars are hard to drive, I’m not going to whine about that, because this is supposed to be the hardest form of auto racing in North America.  It's supposed to be hard.
   "But if it's so hard that you can’t have good racing, then that is a whole different conversation."
   NASCAR officials appear to be relying on Goodyear to save the day, to fix this engineering nightmare that is the COT.
   "I'll tell you that Goodyear has brought tires the last three months that the cars have driven a lot better on," Burton says.  "That's been a major improvement.
   "I mean they have done an incredible job of bringing a better tire.
    "If they continue to make those improvements, I think there is less that has to be done to the car.  
    "I wouldn't support wholesale changes, because of the cost. But if there are subtle things that every team could do inexpensively to make the cars drive a little bit better -- which may make the competition a little better -- then I support that wholeheartedly.  
    "The only reason that being hard to drive makes it wrong is if it's so hard to drive that you can’t race it side-by-side and you can’t put on competitive racing.
   "But I don't see major changes coming. If any changes come, they will be several small things that are relatively inexpensive and easy to adapt to."
   And what does Burton think about the quality of NASCAR racing right now?
   "The thing that baffles me when we talk about the quality of racing and 'Wow, how it used to be,' let's go watch racing how it used to be. 
    "If you think racing is boring now, you should have been here 10 years ago. 
    "There is a perception about what racing used to be that is inaccurate. I think we've glamorized this thing.
    "Now I watched it every Sunday (growing up).  Because I liked it. But if you want to talk about racing the way it was versus the way it is today, then look at how many cars are on the lead lap and look at how many people win races. I'm sorry, there is no comparison.  
   "I will stand firm on this: from Phoenix (mid-April) to this point -- and I understand California (February) wasn’t a good race – if you can show me a six or seven-race stretch that has been as competitive as that six or seven-race stretch, I will be shocked.  If you can pull it out of the archives, show it to me. 
   "The racing in that stretch has been really, really good.
    "I don't think there has ever been a period I have been involved in where we have had a segment of races as good as that segment has been."
   
   

   
Kevin Harvick isn't a bit happy about GM's cuts (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)