NASCAR Analysis: Do relationships between crew chiefs and drivers matter for winning?
Last month, Chris Buescher pointed to a problem for his Roush Fenway Racing team. Buescher, driver of the No. 17 Ford Mustang, said NASCAR’s COVID-19 format of no practice, no qualifying sessions and limited in-person contact at the race shop had stunted the team’s growth.
“Everybody has worked really hard at it and put in countless hours of sim time and (we’re) trying to replicate everything we can,” Buescher said. “But at the end of the day, nothing replaces on-track seat time and face-to-face communication throughout a weekend.”
The value of time on the track, especially for smaller, newer teams, has not been understated. ARCA Series driver Hailie Deegan said this week she has struggled to gain the experience she needs this season to progress to NASCAR’s upper-levels and that the new format “favors the drivers who have been there forever.”
Deegan competes in a lower-level development series. Practice time has been cut by an hour for a session in which drivers are able to make a few laps to check for mechanical issues. For the three national series, practice will not be held through the remainder of the year. For that reason, Buescher and Deegan said, teams that have been together for a long time have an advantage over the field.
“They have notebooks built up,” Buescher said. “They’re unloading really close and not having to make big adjustments during a race.”
It’s easy to look at Kevin Harvick’s eight race wins and regular season domination and attribute the pandemic-era success to the seven years he’s spent with Stewart-Haas Racing and crew chief Rodney Childers. The championship-winning duo even said after the team’s victory at Atlanta Motor Speedway that practice wasn’t essential to their winning ways.
“For us and the 4 car, I feel like it’s almost an advantage not to practice because I feel like that’s what we’re good at,” Childers said.
Past experience at the track also helped put them in Victory Lane. At Atlanta last year, Childers said the team “started getting behind every pit stop, and we weren’t making big enough adjustments and got way too tight toward the end of the race.” This year, Childers said the team was “bound and determined” to correct that by making slightly bigger swings than what they normally would. Those adjustments worked.
Childers also noted another element crucial to all teams that has been disrupted due to the new racing format and protocols, which prevents all non-essential in-person contact.
“The biggest thing is just that communication between those guys and myself and Kevin, talking about what we need and what we think is right,” Childers said.
With both Buescher, ranked 21st in the standings, and Harvick, who is in first, highlighting the advantages of the new format for those with a longstanding team relationship, it’s a wonder whether the trend holds true for all teams after the regular season. An analysis by the Observer indicates there is a very weak correlation between each full-time Cup driver’s average finish this year (excluding Saturday’s race at Richmond) compared with the number of years each driver has spent with his respective crew chief.
While drivers such as Buescher, who transitioned to a new team from JTG Daugherty Racing, has suffered from the combination of limited track time and opportunities to bond with teammates and assimilate into a new organization, others like Harvick, Chase Elliott and Kyle Busch have benefited from their established crew chief relationships in the era of no practice.
“Having that notebook and having that experience that’s been developed over time with myself and Adam (Stevens) certainly helps, gives us a good basis to kind of go off of,” Busch said, noting that the car setups continue to evolve, especially with new races added to the schedule this year.
Still, there are anomalies, such as veteran Joe Gibbs Racing drivers Martin Truex Jr. and Denny Hamlin, who are both in the top-10 but have worked with their respective crew chiefs, James Small and Chris Gabehart, for only one and two years. But while team personnel changes are more recent for Hamlin and Truex, their Cup experience helps make up for that.
There was also the three-way Team Penske swap, in which the drivers, Joey Logano, Brad Keselowski and Ryan Blaney remained with their teams, but their crew chiefs switched up before the start of the season. All three Penske teams have averaged in the top-20 and are running in the playoffs, which is no surprise since they are familiar faces in the postseason.
“I want to have seven or eight wins,” Keselowski said. “But we’re in good shape. We’ve got three wins, a lot of bonus points, a lot to be proud of. I don’t know if I really came in with any expectations.”
That’s probably been the best mindset for the year, given how much the format was disrupted. Although there is only a slight correlation between team performance and driver-crew chief relationships this year, the no practice and limited team time likely has hurt the grid’s collective performance. Last season, the field of full-time Cup drivers who ran last year and this year posted an average finish of 15.7, which is better than this year’s average finish of 16.6.
That’s where Harvick seems like an anomaly, as a driver who said he “would much rather not practice.” He’d rather have the car unloaded, then go straight to racing for a win.
“I think for me, the benefit is having an experienced team,” Harvick said in June. “And being able to get (the setup) close is something that our team is really good at.”
Buescher, meanwhile, is still searching for the same consistency, but that won’t stem from more track time or long face-to-face chats with his teammates this season.
“It’s not an excuse,” Buescher said of his transition.
“But it’s the best understanding for us of why we haven’t been able to get going as quickly as we thought we would.”
This story was originally published September 12, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
