Childress hopes mileage creates big score at Glen

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- If practice makes perfect Richard Childress Racing might be able to one-up this season's previous road course success in the Nextel Cup Series in Sunday's Centurion Boats at The Glen.

If they do that at Watkins Glen International, it would mean a 1-2-3 sweep for the organization that played a two-pit-stop, fuel-miserly strategy in June at Infineon Raceway, where Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer finished in a row behind first-time Cup winner Juan Montoya.

Strategy aside, the race in Sonoma marked the latest upsurge in RCR's road-course efforts, which include Harvick's No. 29 Chevrolet team being the defending champion of Sunday's race.

"Winning at Watkins Glen was a major accomplishment in my career," Harvick said. "We'd been able to win on all the different types of racetracks as we've gone through the years, but the road-course thing, we always had this little cloud over us -- so to finally do that was pretty satisfying, almost a sense of relief because you get so frustrated at places you know you're capable of winning and haven't been able to.

"However, this year it's going to be a new challenge since we are going to race the COT car. We ran well at Sonoma and had a pretty good test at VIR so I think we have a pretty good chance to repeat at Watkins Glen."

Harvick, for one, praised his former RCR teammate Robby Gordon -- who scored RCR's other road course victory here, in 2003 -- for the organization's upswing on road courses.

Gordon, who'll have Tasmanian Marcos Ambrose as a teammate this weekend, is another on the list of favorites that includes Montoya, Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Kurt Busch and dark horse road-course aces Ron Fellows and Boris Said.

"It's one of those deals where our road-racing stuff has been good since Robby came to RCR," Harvick said. "When Robby came [in 2002], we really started putting a lot of emphasis -- whereas before we didn't put any emphasis on our road-race stuff, we just built some cars and maybe went and shook them down.

"Once Robby came, we put emphasis from every nut and bolt that went on the car to spindles to bodies to fuel mileage to everything that goes in the car. From that day that Robby came, we've put emphasis in the road-race program like that every year; so it's something that I enjoy and have been fortunate to be somewhat successful at and hopefully we can continue that as we go forward."

If that was then and this is now, Jeff Burton, who finished third at Infineon, insisted Harvick's the current leader of RCR's road-course efforts. They tested together earlier this year and again, at Virginia International Raceway in Alton, at the end of July.

"Kevin is our leader on the road-course thing and really has made us as competitive as we are," Burton said. "That's as much to do with our performance as anything, is Kevin pushing them to get better fuel mileage, to build better cars -- to do all that and he's talented enough to take advantage of those things; and that's been a huge, huge effort for our road-course program.

"We've worked pretty hard on our road-course program and Kevin has been the leader on that thing -- he's really helped me and Clint, both. We spent a couple of days testing [in June] and Kevin picked me up a good six-, seven-tenths [of a second], and that's a big help to us." (Continued)