In the early days of Furniture Row Racing, competing in North America’s premier series was a humbling experience. The single-car team from Denver often failed to qualify for a 43-car field or was lapped by the race-day leader before the first round of pit stops.
Winning wasn’t the goal, because the only NASCAR Sprint Cup team based west of the Mississippi River had virtually no chance.
In Year 6, however, that is in the rearview mirror of the No. 78 Chevrolet driven by Regan Smith, who leads NASCAR with an average qualifying position of 6.3.
In seven races, he has started among the top five in all but two. His worst qualifying effort was 12th.
“The qualifying is, without a doubt, the highlight of the season for us,” Smith said Monday in a phone interview. “We’ve been fast pretty much everywhere on Friday or Saturday, whichever qualifying day falls on. It says a lot about where we’re at as a team — that we’re building race cars that have speed in them. And it’s a testament to the guys in the shop. We’re proud of that.
“That being said, we definitely have to translate that to better race performance. We’ve had good cars in most races but had some pretty poor luck, to say the least, and some of that was our own doing.”
Smith, who last weekend exceeded $1 million in team earnings, is 30th in the point standings and has an average finish of 28.1.
In the seven races, he has been involved in four accidents, and had a blown engine and a broken brake rotor ruin two other possible top-10 finishes.
He was in position to win the season- opening Daytona 500 on Feb. 20 but settled for seventh — the team’s first-ever top-10 finish — after being hit from behind and spinning out while running third with five laps to go.
Bad luck followed him to the ensuing six races.
“There are signals in all of these races of what we should be doing, but we just haven’t gotten to the end yet,” Furniture Row manager Joe Garone said. “It’s all right there. It just needs to come together. We need to execute, and that’s what we’re working on.”
Furniture Row, owned by Cherry Hills resident Barney Visser, is in its first year of leasing engines from Earnhardt-Childress Racing (ECR), after forming a technical alliance with Richard Childress Racing (RCR) a year ago.
RCR drivers Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton, Clint Bowyer and Paul Menard are considered Smith’s teammates. RCR also provides Furniture Row’s chassis.
“They have been leaning on us because of what we’ve been doing in qualifying, and we lean on them pretty hard for race-day stuff,” Garone said of RCR. “It’s a terrific relationship.”
Furniture Row’s qualifying and race-day results would suggest that the team spends most of its time working on qualifying setup in the first two practice sessions each week. Smith said that’s just a coincidence.
“We don’t do it any differently than any other team, and to be quite honest, in the last two races we’ve spent less on qualifying that most teams,” he said. “We’ve put a little more emphasis on the race setup.”
Mike Chambers: 303-954-1357 or mchambers@denverpost.com
