Current Column Updated February 5 at
IT’S TIME TO PUT UP OR SHUT UP
By Gerald Hodges/the Racing Reporter
With the season’s first race, the Daytona
500, fast approaching, it’s time for some teams and drivers to either “put up
or shut up.”
When a team falls
to the bottom of the points standings, who should be
faulted; the organization itself, or the driver?
In the case of Dale Earnhardt
Jr., his team, Hendrick Motorsports is considered number one in NASCAR, but
Earnhardt has yet to win a race with them. He said the first thing a team does
when they start losing is blame the driver.
“A driver can only do so much,” he said.
“If he doesn’t have a car capable of winning a race, he’s not going to have a
good day. If a driver has a poor handling car, he’s going to be stuck back in
the middle with all the other guys that are having bad days.”
But Earnhardt is not alone.
There are several Cup drivers that have what are considered great teams, but
either no wins or a subpar performance.
Joey Logano came to the Cup scene with
great expectations, but after several years with Joe Gibbs Racing, he has only
one win, thanks to a rainout. The other two JGR teams driven by Denny Hamlin
and Kyle Busch have several wins.
So the argument might be that Logano just
doesn’t have the potential to be a great driver.
Let’s look at the Earnhardt Ganassi team,
which fields cars for Juan Montoya and Jamie McMurray. This outfit has adequate
funding and good equipment. They announced last week that their 2012
sponsorship quota had been reached.
With enough money it would seem any team
could “buy” themselves out of a hole, by having the latest equipment and racing
know-how.
But this hasn’t been true for Ganassi’s
two teams.
A year after combining to win four Sprint
Cup races, including the sport’s two biggest events, Montoya and McMurray both
went winless last year and finished 21st and 27th, respectively, in points.
Both drivers had just two top-five finishes all season and were no threat to
make the Chase.
How could an organization that won the
Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400 and two other Cup races in 2010 fall so far in
2011?
While that still seems somewhat of a mystery
to the drivers and crew chiefs, Ganassi has a good idea, and is very specific
in summing that up as well.
“It’s obviously looking at the wrong things
and being led astray,” he said. “We live in the information age and I don’t
want to be in the information age, I want to be in the correct information age.
I don’t need bad information, I need correct information.
“And that’s obviously what happens with
these teams. They get the wrong information and they are focused on the wrong
things. That’s how you think they are going to be good and they end up being
bad. They were good for reasons that they don’t even know why.”
The information highway in NASCAR runs so
fast that what is new today may be outdated tomorrow. Rick Hendrick told a
group of reporters last week during the Charlotte Media Tour, “If you plan on
using last year’s technology and information, you might as well close up shop.”
Ganassi cleaned house during the off
season. Gone are competition director Steve Hmiel and team manager Tony Glover,
two long-time veterans of the sport. Glover had been with the organization
since co-owner Felix Sabates sold the majority of the team to Ganassi and Hmiel
came over when the team merged with Dale Earnhardt Inc. in 2009.
Crew chief
Brian Pattie also is gone, along with several other crewmen and engineers.
Former Roush Fenway Racing manager Max Jones
has taken over as team manager while former Red Bull Racing technical director
John Probst is the new technical director at Earnhardt Ganassi.
The first order of business is trying to
figure out where the team got off track.
McMurray
says simply, “I don’t know.” Asked what changed from 2010 to 2011, he says,
“Nothing.”
“That’s what makes it so frustrating for us.
We ended 2010 so good and we went into last year and didn’t really change
anything and struggled,” he said. “… It wasn’t like we went back and tried to
recreate the wheel and make things better; we didn’t change anything. We just
didn’t have the success that we had, and the cars just weren’t as fast.
“It
seemed like we took just a short break (after 2010) and we went back to the
track and no one knew our name, we didn’t know our name. We didn’t know where
we were headed for some strange reason. The difficult part is putting our
finger on what happened.”
Felix Sabates said that the team’s cars
simply were not being built correctly.
“We went to (one race) and both cars wrecked
within half a lap of each other. The frame came apart in both cars,” he said.
“We thought we had something great, and it
might have been great for IndyCar, and that’s where we had some of the engineering
people we had [come] from. That doesn’t work. You’ve got to have a guy from
(NASCAR) to make the cars go.”
Sabates said another sure sign that the
problem was the cars was Montoya’s performance at Infineon Raceway, where he
finished 22nd. Montoya has two Cup wins – both on road courses, including a
2007 victory at Infineon.
“When you go to a road course and Montoya is
not one of the prominent drivers, that tells you something is wrong,” Sabates
said. “That might have been the eye-opener for Chip, when he saw Montoya in the
back of the pack at Sonoma.”
Sabates said it was difficult to pinpoint
the source of the problems, thus the wholesale changes.
“It’s time for us to put up or shut up. This
has got to be the year when we shine and show people that we are here again.”
The 54th annual
Daytona 500 on Sunday, Feb. 26 will carry a record purse of more than $19
million as well as a new contingency award that will payout $200,000 to the
driver leading at the completion of Lap 100. The posted awards for "The
Great American Race" are $19,142,601 with the winner collecting a minimum
of $1,431,325. The second, third, fourth and fifth-place finishers in the
Daytona 500 will receive a minimum of $1,050,075, $759,600, $609,900 and $486,550.
The Daytona 500 Mid-Race Leader Award will reward the driver leading the midway
point of the historic 200-lap, 500-mile race with a $200,000 bonus. If the race
is under caution at Lap 100, the leader of the race at the completion of the
fifth consecutive green flag lap following the caution will receive the award.
Racing Trivia Question: How many Daytona 500 wins does
Michael Waltrip have?
Last Week’s Question: Who won the 2011 Daytona 500? Answer. Trevor Bayne.
You may contact the Racing Reporter at hodges@race500.com.
Jamie McMurray after his 2010 Daytona 500 win