Jeff Burton leads strong effort by Richard Childress Racing with runner-up finish
Jeff Burton led a strong effort for Richard Childress Racing with a second-place finish in Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
HOMESTEAD, Fla. - Richard Childress Racing certainly seems to be heading in the right direction, especially with the newly formed pairing of driver Jeff Burton and crew chief Todd Berrier.
The pair earned their second consecutive second-place finish in Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
"Obviously, it has been a really good four weeks," Burton said. "We're real proud of everybody's effort. That is one thing, even though we haven't been running like we need to, everybody has been working really hard and putting a lot of effort out there and that is all I can ask for. Even early in the year when we weren't running well everybody was still working hard. That is why you never heard me get down on that group of people and their efforts there.
"Todd has done an incredible job putting the team together very quickly and we put ourselves in position. We just got a little bit off on that last run and I think that is me just not knowing what to tell Todd just yet. He gave me a car fast enough to win the race. I needed to be screaming a little bit more about what I thought I needed. That will come. You know what I mean, with communication. Everybody did their part and I came up a little short."
Burton said the team has a good baseline at this point. Burton spent much of the season competing with crew chief Scott Miller, who has moved to a new role helping run RCR's competition department.
Teammate Kevin Harvick also enjoyed a strong outing in the race, leading twice for 56 laps before settling for third.
For an RCR contingent that has struggled at times this season, the last races of the season showed a definite step in the right direction. Sunday, teammate Clint Bowyer was 11th and Casey Mears was 19th.
"It was a good night for us," Harvick said. "Obviously … we wanted to win the race. We got off a couple runs there in the middle of the race with a flat right-front tire and overadjusted it for the second run and kind of lost some track position.
"But [it was a] good weekend. It's been a good last several months. Really since [Infineon Raceway] I think the cars have shown the speed that they needed to. We've crashed a lot and made a lot of mistakes from all angles to kind of screw that up when we had good cars. ... But the speed has been there, and now we just need to get the consistency back and do the things we've always been known for as a company, and that's being consistent and making decent days out of bad days. You know, [I'm] happy with the turnaround, and we'll go forward."
The question now is, how far forward. A year after placing all three of its drivers in the Chase For The Sprint Cup, RCR closes the 2009 season with a top points position of 15th, by Bowyer. Burton is 17th, Harvick 19th and Mears 21st. And most of those show a recent climb in position.
Obviously the team has been working on its equipment and has made a step in the right direction.
Now they want to make sure that continues into next season as the teams are leaving the final race of the season with their attention already on 2010.
"The biggest thing is we just can't sit on our hands," Harvick said. "We have to push forward. 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 going into the offseason as far as the things that we need to work on. And the biggest thing when it comes down to it is 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, and you've got to get ahead, and once you get ahead, you can't stop, you've got to keep pushing."
