Loading ...The direction of one's life often comes full circle and this seems to be particularly true in motorsports. The most recent example of this is going on at Richard Childress Racing as Jeff Burton and Drew Blickensderfer have been teamed up as driver as well as crew chief. Both of their glory days came when they were together at Roush Racing, albeit not on the same racing team.
Burton, 44, could muster only two top-five finishes and five top-10s. as a result he languished to a 20th-place points finish in the series points standings. his worst since 1995, back when the South Boston, Va. native was still paying his dues with Stavola Brothers Racing.
Self-analysis would be an understatement to describe how Burton dealt with the results of last season. It is something he does every offseason, but obviously this offseason it was at a new level and took on a new significance.
“When you reach my age, and not that I’ve done as much as other people have but I won my share of races, I think people become less willing to tell you what they think,” Burton said. “When I was driving for [crew chief] Buddy Parrott, he would pull me aside and say, ‘You need to do this better, you need to do that better.’ He did it in a nice way, but he would tell me. You start having success and nobody wants to tell you anymore.”
“Part of my role as a driver is to do the things I need to do to make sure that car is fast enough,” he said. “Last year obviously I didn’t do a good job. I don’t think I did a bad job in my driving. I think I did a bad job of being integrated, being forceful enough at times; I could have done a better job to help move us in a direction.”
And auto racing isn’t like other sports where videotape can tell much about an athlete’s performance, breaking down every nuance of a run, a pass, an at-bat or drive in the lane.
Burton noted, “all you see is a car. So it’s hard to know.”
Last season began badly for Burton and just got worse form there. If ti could go wrong for the no. 31 Chevrolet team, it did. At least from the starting point of self-analysis, no video tapes are required. The team suffered an engine failure during the Daytona 500. Another engine failure came three months later at another of the circuit's premiere, glory tracks, Darlington. In between, when he did finish they were mediocre results at best, in the mid 20s. The season was well beyond halfway when he and his team started to show some semblance of his former success, a top-10. By then, he was 24th in points and no one was asking him about his Chase chances.
Enter Blickensderfer, who lost his job at Roush/Fenway racing when it dropped one of its four Sprint Cup teams.
With Matt Kenseth and then David Ragan wheeling the Fords, Blickensderfer served as crew chief for 82 races at Roush Fenway Racing. He earned three wins, back-to-back victories to open the 2009 season with Kenseth and then the 2011 Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. Ragan’s victory was the first and the only of his Sprint Cup career.
“To me, you have to technically be smart enough to be able to do it,” Burton said. “You have to have the desire to do it. You have to have the understanding of what it takes to be successful in today’s world, which will be different tomorrow. He’s adapted to everything he’s ever been in. He’s worked his way up from the bottom.
“I’ve seen what he has done with the drivers he has worked with [in the past]. I just think he’s the right guy.”
“I think there was a deal at RCR where the crew chiefs are in charge and I think instead of having common race cars, they had whatever the crew chief wanted,” Blickensderfer said. “I think that drastically made the 29, the 33, the 31, all these cars different, and that’s why you saw the 29 be able to compete for the championships and the 31 not compete for championships in the last year.”
Harvick earned third place in the final series point standings, but the rest of the RCR drivers were average with Clint Bowyer taking 13th, Menard settling for 17th and Burton mustering only 20th place.
Going forward, the idea is for the cars to be similar enough so that if one team is struggling, it will be able to use information from its teammates as a baseline to hopefully get back on track.
“There’s nothing worse on a Saturday afternoon than having a fast teammate but having a different chassis design and you can’t get to him anyway,” Blickensderfer said. “If we can have a common goal on our chassis and bodies and things like that, once we’re all doing good everything will go fine and if one of us gets off, we’ll be able to get back to the other guys easier.”
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