Yahoo Sports 2020 NASCAR team reviews: Richard Childress Racing and Richard Petty Motorsports
With the 2020 NASCAR season officially over, it’s time to take a look back at how each team performed over the course of the season. We started our team reviews with JTG-Daugherty Racing, Front Row Motorsports, and Roush Fenway Racing. Today it’s time for both Richard Childress Racing and Richard Petty Motorsports because RPM has an alliance with RCR.
Drivers
Austin Dillon
1 win, 4 top 5s, 9 top 10s, 11th in the standings
Tyler Reddick
3 top 5s, 9 top 10s, 19th in the standings
Bubba Wallace
1 top 5, 5 top 10s, 22nd in the standings
Let’s start with Wallace, who is moving on from RPM to Denny Hamlin and Michael Jordan’s new team in 2021.
Wallace had the best season of his career on the track in 2020 and then became a superstar off it, thanks to his social activism efforts and NASCAR’s decision to ban fans from flying the Confederate flag at racetracks.
Wallace entered the season with four career top-10 finishes and ended up scoring five throughout the 2020 season. He was fifth in the summer Daytona oval race and also finished in the top 10 at the first Las Vegas and Bristol races and at Indianapolis and Michigan. It was the second consecutive season that Wallace had finished in the top 10 at Indy.
But RPM isn’t showing signs of being a winning organization anytime soon. So while Wallace improved six positions in the points standings from 2019, he made the decision to move to 23XI Racing for a chance to win races.
Quite frankly, a Wallace that wins races will be great for NASCAR. The series doesn’t need another driver who is known by non-NASCAR fans but doesn’t compete for wins.
While Wallace is leaving RPM, both Dillon and Reddick will be back with RCR in 2021. Reddick’s rookie season was a successful one. He outperformed Cole Custer on the whole, though Custer made the playoffs because of that win at Kentucky.
Reddick’s average finish of 17.5 was better than Custer’s and just 0.2 positions worse than Jimmie Johnson’s. And he scored top-10 finishes at intermediate tracks, short tracks and big tracks. It’s easy to see how the two-time Xfinity Series champion can be a fringe playoff contender in 2021.
Dillon qualified for the playoffs because of his win at Texas over the summer. That win came five races before he missed the Daytona road course race because of a positive coronavirus test. He returned with three races to go before the playoffs and ended up finishing just outside of the top 10.
That relative playoff success came thanks to a second-place finish at Darlington and a fourth-place finish at Richmond. While Dillon was eliminated from the playoffs in the second round thanks to a 32nd-place finish at Las Vegas, Dillon hung around on the periphery of the top 10 thanks to five finishes between 10th and 20th over the last six races of the season.
Grade: B+
It’s tempting to go with an A here. Dillon made a 10-spot jump in the standings since he finished 21st in 2019 and his four top-five finishes matched a career high and the team went 1-2 at Texas when Reddick finished right behind Dillon.
RCR’s decision to replace Daniel Hemric after just one season with Reddick paid off, too. Reddick ended up six spots higher than Hemric in the standings and tripled his number of top-five finishes.
RPM, meanwhile, had its best driver season since Aric Almirola was 17th in 2015. That’s a big deal for a team that hadn’t had a driver finish higher than 26th since then. What can Erik Jones do in the No. 43 car in 2021?
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