RPM’s Hiring of Ford Marks Start of Silly Season at BetLM

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (NASCAR/Newsfeed) — Nobody thought Mike Ford would be out of work very long when Joe Gibbs Rac­ing dis­missed the crew chief in Decem­ber after a dis­ap­point­ing 2011 sea­son with Denny Ham­lin.

Because JGR still owed him for the final year on his con­tract, Ford was in no rush to climb back atop a pit box. And if he had to spend the entire sea­son sit­ting at home, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

But crew chiefs don’t sit idle for very long in NASCAR, and that was proven once again Mon­day when Richard Petty Motor­sports pulled Ford back into the Sprint Cup garage. After just nine races, the team decided the pair­ing of Aric Almirola and crew chief Greg Erwin wasn’t a fit, and Ford was hired to take over the iconic No. 43 team.

“Mike Ford is an elite crew chief who knows what it takes to be a win­ner at this level,” team owner Richard Petty said. “We’re for­tu­nate that he was avail­able and that we could reach a deal to bring him over to our place. We’ve taken a lot of big steps at Richard Petty Motor­sports in the past year, and I think this might be that one piece of the puz­zle we were missing.”

It’s only a quar­ter of the way through the gru­el­ing NASCAR sched­ule, and maybe in a dif­fer­ent era, slump­ing teams could still hope for a mid­sea­son turnaround.

Nobody has that lux­ury any­more, so when it becomes evi­dent that some­thing has to change in an effort to save the sea­son, the crew chief is usu­ally the first guy to go.

So it was Erwin to get the first hook of the 2012 sea­son, and he didn’t even make it a year with the Petty organization.

He had been let go as Greg Biffle’s crew chief last July, and was snapped up rather quickly at RPM, which paired him with AJ All­mendinger. Every­body seemed happy, and then All­mendinger got an off­sea­son offer to move to Penske Rac­ing. He took the job, and RPM had to quickly find a new driver.

They set­tled on Almirola, who had 35 pre­vi­ous Sprint Cup starts but none since the last five races of the 2010 sea­son. The results have been sub-par – Almirola has one top-10 fin­ish and is cur­rently 23rd in the standings.

It wasn’t good enough.

“It’s a goal of the 43 team to make the Chase this year, and I think Mike’s expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge can help get us there,” Almirola said. “We’ve got some ground to make up, but I think we can do it.”

That’s the present-day men­tal­ity in NASCAR, where claim­ing one of the 12 spots in the Chase for the Sprint Cup cham­pi­onship is the new mea­sur­ing point for a suc­cess­ful season.

Dri­vers and crews want to be in the Chase so they can race for the cham­pi­onship, but for team own­ers, get­ting one of those slots is often enough to pla­cate the spon­sor. Being part of the Chase ensures max­i­mum expo­sure over the final 10 weeks of the sea­son, and those cars and dri­vers con­sis­tently over­shadow the other 31 in the field.

Some have sug­gested that the pres­sure to make the Chase is partly to blame for the caution-free rac­ing over the last month. Dri­vers have to con­stantly think about the big pic­ture, and maybe aren’t tak­ing the chances they once did out of fear of it hurt­ing too much in the standings.

“Rac­ing has changed because right now, there is so much empha­sis put on the almighty point, that we live and die by that one point,” Nation­wide Series points leader Elliott Sadler said last weekend.

“Rac­ing is seg­re­gated right now between mak­ing the Chase and not mak­ing the Chase. You can’t take as many chances now as you could seven or eight years ago, because if you fin­ish 30th or worse, it’s going to take you three or four races to get back in that Chase contention.”

It remains to be seen if Ford, who guided Ham­lin to 17 vic­to­ries and a spot in the Chase all six sea­sons they were paired together, can get Almirola into one of those cov­eted 12 spots. But RPM felt the team had to go for it, and the longer they waited, the harder it would be to make up ground.

It’s highly doubt­ful that RPM will be the only orga­ni­za­tion to make a change over the next few weeks. Every team sit­ting out­side the top 15 right now – save for maybe the Hen­drick Motor­sports’ crews of Jeff Gor­don and Kasey Kahne – have to be tak­ing a good long look at per­son­nel and won­der­ing if new blood is needed.

Jamie McMur­ray, win­ner of three races in 2010, hasn’t done any­thing since and is 18th in the stand­ings, and Jeff Bur­ton, who has pub­licly said his Richard Chil­dress Rac­ing team needs to get bet­ter, is sit­ting 20th in points – behind Mark Mar­tin, who has run only seven of the nine races this year.

Regan Smith, who won Dar­ling­ton last sea­son, can’t be pleased he’s cur­rently 25th in the stand­ings as he closes in on the anniver­sary of his only career Cup vic­tory. And right below him is 2004 series cham­pion Kurt Busch, who has just one top-10 fin­ish this sea­son with under­funded Phoenix Racing.

Nobody can stand pat for long, and RPM’s hir­ing of Ford showed that silly sea­son has offi­cially started.