RCR to swap pit crew of the #29 and #07

April 24, 3:11 PMDetroit NASCAR ExaminerJosh Lobdell

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Harvick to get new Pit Crew (Getty Images)

Richard Childress racing has made the decision to swap the team of the #29 car of Kevin Harvick and the #07 car of Casey Mears. After this weekend at Talladega Todd Berrier will take his team from the atop the #29 car to atop of the #07 car and Gil Martin will do the same in reverse.

RCR is making this move to hopefully boost the performance of each car. Harvick is a disappointing 16th in the points on the strength of two top five and two more top ten finishes. Harvick is averaging a 19.2 place finish and that is below what RCR and the NASCAR media expected of him.

Mears on the other hand is 22nd in points on the strength of his 21.4 average finish so far in 2009. That doesn’t surprise me at all. Mears is proving that he is not capable of performing on this stage. He has now spent the better part of three season in top the top rides of the Cup series, and has only been able to win one time on a fuel strategy. Simply put that is not good enough, and this may be Casey’s final chance in cup series top equipment.

The Harvick struggle is a little more troubling. Harvick has not won a cup race since the 2007 Daytona 500 (he also won the All Star Race in May of that year). So far this year the case can be made that not only Harvick but ¾’s of the RCR team have severely underperformed.

The only RCR car running consistently is the #33 of Clint Bowyer who is driving for a newly formed team in 2009. This may be a case of the organization adjusting to running four full time teams, or it may be a far deeper problem than that.

If that is the case or not, NASCAR fans have seen these kinds of crew swaps before, in fact this is the second or third time Richard Childress has made such a move. The most famous of those happened in the late 1990’s when he swapped the crews and crew chiefs of #3 Dale Earnhardt Sr. and #31 of Mike Skinner.

That swap had no real effect and over the years other teams have tried it with similar lackluster results. This seems to indicate that instead of swapping out entire crews, racing teams should mix up those crews and try to find a better chemistry mix.
Granted changing up crews in the middle of a season can be a tough thing to accomplish I am willing to bet that it would have a larger impact on the team’s performance