Does Richard Childress Racing's Casey Mears have another Coca-Cola 600 win in the tank?
Richard Childress Racing's Casey Mears has one top-10 finish in the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
Two years removed from a trip to victory lane in the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, Casey Mears hopes to get back there on Sunday with a different team – Richard Childress Racing.
“It’s such a long race,” Mears said of the 600-mile, 400-lap event. “There are so many things that can go wrong. If you ask anyone who has ever won that race, I’d be willing to bet they’d say there were three or four things that happened throughout the race that made them think there was no way in the world they were going to win.
“There are so many times where you might be in the wrong place at the wrong time or just miss a wreck. So many things go on over the course of 600 miles.”
When Mears won the 600 in 2007, just about everything went right. That included a late call to stretch his final tank of fuel to the end while several frontrunners were forced to pit for a late splash of gas.
The gamble paid off as Mears, driving for Hendrick Motorsports at the time, captured his first Cup victory in his 156th career start. Mears, who left Hendrick for RCR in 2009, hasn’t won again since.
“We had a top-five race car the year we won the race,” the Bakersfield, Calif., native said. “We ran in the top five for pretty much the whole race and, at the end, made the call to win. Sometimes, I think a little bit gets taken away from us on that win because it turned out to be fuel mileage. But it wasn’t like we were running 20th and made a call to try and steal one.
“We were running in the top five with a lot of guys who had the opportunity to make the same call and didn’t. We made the right call, and it was fun.”
Mears hasn’t had much fun in 2009, a campaign in which he and his No. 07 team have netted only one top-10 in 11 starts. The group’s struggles, coupled with those of the No. 29 RCR team of driver Kevin Harvick, prompted team owner Richard Childress to swap crews prior to the Richmond race earlier this month.
Since then, Mears has finished a season-best ninth at Richmond and 36th the following week at Darlington.
He’s banking on a better outcome in the Coca-Cola 600, a race that begins in the heat of the day and ends under cooler nighttime temperatures.
“I’ve had a car that was horrible during the day, and as soon as the sun started going down, we picked up speed,” Mears said. “The track definitely changes, and you have to keep up with it. When you’re practicing, you have to keep in mind that the majority of the race is going to be at night, but that’s hard to do. All of our practices are during the day, so that makes it tougher to get the car set up for when the sun goes down.
“A lot of times, you have to rely on your notes from the year before to develop a baseline. There are a lot of different variables.”
Sunday’s race will mark just Mears’ third outing with crew chief Todd Berrier, who swapped roles with Gil Martin.
When Mears won at LMS two years ago while at Hendrick, he was teamed with Darian Grubb, now the crew chief on Tony Stewart’s team at Stewart-Haas Racing.
“That’s been hard for me going from team to team every year,” Mears said. “It’s hard to go to the track and say ‘Well, we did this,’ when, in all reality, we don’t have a clue where I was at last year because the chassis are a little different and the bodies are a little different.
“Things that may have worked for us last year might not apply at RCR. I really have to bounce things off of and see what worked for them and try to blend in what I know when I can.”
