Under The Radar No More. Welcome Back, RCR!

No need to adjust your televisions or your computer monitors.

If you have seen the standings after Sunday’s Auto Club 500, don't worry, you saw them correctly.

The entire Richard Childress Racing stable is in the top five. Seriously.

It's a nice bounce back for an organization that put as many cars in the Chase as I did last season.

Sure, it’s still very early, but maybe we should have seen this coming. Over the last six points races, dating back to last year, Jeff Burton, Clint Bowyer, and Kevin Harvick have had an average finish of 5.3, 8.2, and 10.3 respectively. To put that into perspective, four-time defending champ Jimmie Johnson has had an average finish of 14.3 over that same stretch.

Welcome back, RCR.

Owning one of the oldest teams in the sport, Childress has fielded at least one car in every race in what is now known as the Sprint Cup Series since 1972. Since then, several legends have driven under the RCR banner, including Neil Bonnet and Ricky Rudd.

Oh, yeah, and there was that Dale Earnhardt guy.  During his time with RCR, The Hall of Famer won an astounding six of his record tying seven championships.

Since Earnhardt’s death in 2001, though, Childress has only enjoyed moderate on-again, off-again success. Though his teams have scored 20 wins, none have ever been a legitimate threat for a championship during that time, and only Harvick, who replaced Earnhardt after his death,  has been there for the entire duration.

Last season was one of those “off-again” years, where all four Childress-owned cars went winless and missed the Chase. Even with the late season push, none of the teams finished better than 15^th in the standings.

Over the offseason, it seemed Richard Childress Racing may be a team in turmoil. With sponsor Jack Daniel’s leaving, the organization was forced to completely axe the 07 team, leaving driver Casey Mears without a ride.

To go along with that, rumors began surfacing that Harvick was no longer happy at RCR. Coming off his worst season since 2002, the driver of the 29 was supposedly looking for greener pastures, specifically Stewart-HAAS racing.

It looks like Harvick might want to put his travel plans on hold.

Harvick, after two races, holds a 19 point lead over teammate Bowyer and the rest of the field in the standings. While it wasn’t for any points, he did win the Budweiser Shutout, an All-Star type event held before the beginning of the season. He also had as dominant a car as a driver can have at Daytona during the 500, falling victim to the green-white-checkered finishes and getting shuffled into the wrong lines at the end.

Sunday, he was one scrape of the wall away from winning at Auto Club.

“You always need to get better,” Harvick said in the post race media conference. “You need  to constantly work on everything to keep going forward.”

RCR has certainly been moving forward. So what’s the next challenge for the organization?

“It’s not catching up, we did that,” Harvick said. “It’s just getting in front of everybody else.”

That will certainly be the difficult part, considering the domination rival Hendrick Motorsports has enjoyed, with three cars finishing one-two-three in the points last season.

It looks like HMS won't be suffering a hangover this season. Despite nearly getting caught on pit road when a caution came out late, Jimmie Johnson won Sunday’s Auto Club 500, leading 101 of 250 laps in the process.

“They got a break there, but they did a really good job of making their car good when it needed to be good,” said Burton, who after a speeding penalty during the mid portion of the race, drove it through the field to lead 46 laps and finish third.

“They definitely got a break, but they executed on it, and that’s what they do so well.”

That’s why Johnson and Chad Knaus, crew chief on the 48, are the best team in the sport. They seem to make every right decision. Even when they seem beat, they come out of nowhere in the final laps to eke out a top five.

Harvick went so far as to suggest that they, “…have a golden horseshoe stuck up their a**.

That’s what Harvick, Burton, Bowyer, and the RCR organization as a whole are up against, a combination of luck and skill that has lasted for four years running and shows no signs of slowing down yet.

But if recent performance is at all indicative of how well Childress’ group will run this year, they just may have what it takes to end the HMS stranglehold on the Sprint Cup Series. They certainly don’t lack confidence.

“Until everybody gets out here and they give somebody a trophy, you really don’t know where you stand,” said Burton. “But, you know, I expected to run well.”

That’s the attitude a team needs. And this season, the RCR boys have it.

They started the year under the radar. It may be early, but it doesn’t look like they are going to finish that way.