For the past several seasons, the Nationwide Series cars to beat most weeks were from the Joe Gibbs Racing team. But this year, JR Motorsports, the team co-owned by Dale Earnhardt Jr., his sister Kelley Earnhardt Miller and Rick Hendrick, is showing some early-season strength.
Rookie driver Chase Elliott won last week at Texas Motor Speedway and leads the points standings heading into Friday night’s VFW Sports Clips Help A Hero 200 at Darlington Raceway. His teammate Regan Smith won the season opener at Daytona International Speedway and is second in the standings, two points behind Elliott.
Last week, the team, in a rare move, fielded four cars at Texas, and all four finished in the top seven, with Kevin Harvick fourth, Earnhardt fifth and Smith seventh.
Miller said on this week’s NASCAR teleconference that the team’s improvement has come in large part because of the performance of the people who prepare the cars.
“We’ve just continued to bring people on board that want to keep elevating our program, and they keep digging and working harder and harder each and every week just to find that little bit that it takes to perform at the level that we’re performing this year,” she said, adding that it was especially rewarding to have all four cars run well at Texas because that meant a lot of work by a relatively small group of employees.
“Literally we had to prepare eight cars for the weekend when you’re talking about our primaries and backups, and our folks here, being in the Nationwide Series, we work on a much tighter budget, and so we work with less people that do more jobs, and they’re not as specialized as they are on the Cup side.”
Miller said she expects the strong runs to continue.
“We feel like we’re legitimate contenders to be one of the teams that can win the driver and owner’s points championship this year if we continue to do what we’ve been doing and work hard and continue the success that we’ve had,” she said.
Earnhardt said he, too, has high expectations.
“We want to win a championship so bad this year,” he said. “I couldn’t be prouder, really, of how we’ve come along in the last two or three years, the people that we have been able to acquire to help and improve our company, the bridge that we built with (Hendrick Motorsports) to flow information on the engineering side, motors, and how they’ve improved.
“Everything is clicking along right now, so we’ve got a great opportunity this year to seize the moment.”
Gordon takes the lead: Jeff Gordon enters this weekend's Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway as the Sprint Cup Series points leader. It's the first time he's been in that position since 2009, when he finished 14th in a rain-shortened Coca-Cola 600 won by David Reutimann, but still managed to hang on to the points lead he had held for much of the early months of '09.
Like this year, Gordon started strong in ’09, winning at Texas and finishing in the top six in seven of the first 11 races. This year, he hasn’t won, but has five top-10 finishes, three of them top-fives, in the first seven races. And next up is Darlington, where he leads all active drivers with seven victories.
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