Parity keeps Hendrick Motorsports out of Victory Lane

By JENNA FRYER

The Associated Press

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Joe Gibbs Racing should have won at Bristol Motor Speedway. Instead, it was a Richard Childress Racing sweep.

Once again, Hendrick Motorsports was nowhere near Victory Lane.

Five races into the season, the team that won 18 of 36 races last year is still looking for its first victory. Yet to call it a Hendrick slump might be overstating what's really going on right now in NASCAR.

For the first time in recent memory, there appears to be parity in NASCAR's top series.

All four manufacturers and four different teams have won at least one race this year, and Carl Edwards made Roush Fenway Racing the only multiple winner. At this point last season, Hendrick had three wins and Chevrolet had four.

Early results hinted this season wouldn't be a repeat of Hendrick's runaway rout, and Sunday's race at Bristol solidified it. Jimmie Johnson was the only Hendrick car to lead laps -- a meager 14 of them -- but none after Lap 53.

Instead, Gibbs drivers Tony Stewart, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch battled each other for the lead while combining to pace the field for 372 of the 506 laps.

When they weren't out front, a Childress car was: Kevin Harvick, Clint Bowyer and Jeff Burton combined to lead 115 of the laps. Then it was Burton jumping past Hamlin for the lead during the two-lap overtime sprint to the finish, and taking Harvick and Bowyer with him for the first 1-2-3 team sweep in NASCAR since Roush did it in the 2005 season finale.

It was more than luck that pushed the three Childress cars to the front Sunday. It was hard work and a commitment to try to knock Hendrick off the throne it has occupied the past two seasons.

In fact, it was Burton himself who loudly declared before the season that everyone was gunning for Hendrick.

"We're not coming into this year to take a butt-whipping," he said in January. "We're not here to run second. We're not here to talk about how good Hendrick is.

"That's not why we exist. We exist so people talk about us."

Now that people are talking about teams other than Hendrick, Burton is among the first to downplay any perceived slump. While noting that five-time Bristol winner Jeff Gordon had an uncharacteristically quiet 11th-place run, Burton suggested it was only a matter of time before the Hendrick drivers return to their winning ways.

"You wake the sleeping giant, they're going to be hard to beat," he warned. "There's no getting around that."

Except, unlike the last few seasons, there are teams apparently capable of beating them.

So what exactly has happened to close the competition?

In some regards, the competition was never that far off. Rick Hendrick, himself, admits his team lucked into many of its wins last season, particularly early in the year when Gibbs drivers seemed headed to victories before mechanical failures and pit road miscues handed Hendrick cars the win.

"We had great racers' luck. We were not as good as we looked last year," said the owner. "We were not that much better than everybody else."

And in running as well as it did, the Hendrick group was somewhat saddled by three of its teams racing for the championship. It forced the organization to focus on the final 10 races of the year, while many groups were able to devote more resources toward 2008 preparations.

Don't be mistaken into believing Hendrick has fallen behind, because by normal standards they most certainly haven't.

It's just that everyone else has had a chance to finally catch up.

"Everybody shoots at who is the best," Childress said. "Last year they were the best, and we had to put our sights on them."

Credit also must be given to the Car of Tomorrow, which was phased in last season for 16 races. Hendrick won nine of them, including the first five, as the team took an aggressive approach to the car.

The rest of the industry was forced to play catch-up on the car, which was designed by NASCAR to bolster competition, improve safety and cut team costs.

It's apparently contributed to the parity, as well, making it possible for rival drivers to catch the likes of Gordon, Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Unlike last season, when advance work and an abundance of technical data put the Hendrick cars ahead of most everyone else, the cars are seemingly equal.

"One of the purposes of the new car was to enhance competition for all teams and we're seeing that," NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said

Now that the car is being used exclusively at the Cup level, teams aren't flipping between programs and can focus solely on building one set of cars that can be used at a variety of tracks.

"You know, we were all behind," said Bowyer, who won Saturday's Nationwide Race and finished third in the Cup event. "We set goals. We knew what cars we had to beat ... to compete for a championship. We worked hard over the winter, all of us."

Jenna Fryer covers NASCAR racing for The Associated Press.