TALLADEGA, Ala. - After Richard Childress watched his NASCAR Sprint Cup organization's performance through what he expected to be some good races for his four teams, he decided to make a change.

On April 5, he walked out of Texas Motor Speedway, where three of his teams finished 22nd or worse, knowing that a change would be made. During his ensuing visit to his Montana cabin, he decided to switch the entire crews of Kevin Harvick and Casey Mears.

Childress announced the change, which will take place following this weekend's race at Talladega Superspeedway, earlier this week. That moves crew chief Todd Berrier and his squad to Mears' team and puts crew chief Gil Martin and his team with Harvick. The teams of Clint Bowyer and Jeff Burton remain intact.

Childress said Friday morning at Talladega that he sat down with the members of all four Richard Childress Racing teams and explained that he felt the switch would positively impact all of the group's teams. All of the crew members of the two outfits, except for the spotters, will realign Monday.

Last season, all three of RCR's drivers made the Chase For The Sprint Cup. This season, as the organization expanded to four teams and added Mears to the lineup, they haven't performed as well as Childress would have liked. Entering the Talladega race weekend, Bowyer leads the group at sixth in the standings. Burton follows in 11th, with Harvick 16th and Mears 22nd.

Childress said that while eight races have been run, only 18 remain until the championship-determining Chase field of 12 is locked in, forcing him to make a decision.

"In today's environment, you can't wait sometimes halfway through the season," he said. "With the points structure like it is, you've got to make changes to make the Chase. We only have so many races before the Chase. …

"We owe it to our sponsors and our fans to run better than what we are, and I felt like these were the two teams right now that were the weakest. They are great race teams. Both of them are great teams. The [No.] 07 with Gil Martin and those guys have finished in the top five two years in a row in the points. Kevin finished fourth last year with his team in the points. Sometimes a little chemistry or sometimes a little change will make a big difference. And I'm not only doing it for these two race teams, we’re doing it to help RCR as a whole."

Harvick has worked with crew chief Berrier since 2003. Childress says it's not that the pair isn't communicating well or anything specific such as that. Sometimes, it just takes a change to spark a team, he indicated.

And Childress made it clear that he expects his teams will be competitive - even if he needs to make more changes.

"Sometimes it's kind of like a divorce," he said. "When a man and a woman [are] getting a divorce and they think they're both giving 100 percent, then the first thing she wants to do is get in a tanning bed and lose 30 pounds, and he goes and gets rid of his gut and gets him a sports car. Maybe the change - it's always worked for us in the past, and, hopefully, this will make it work."

And if this doesn't work?

"We don't have an option," he said. "It has to work."

Childress said other changes, including engineering moves, have been made within the organization as well.

He said that the teams reacted in a positive way to the changes.

"All of them want what's best for RCR, and that was the comments that I got back from the crew chiefs, the drivers and everything is, whatever's going to [be] best for RCR, we’re willing to do it, and we've got Jeff Burton and Clint Bowyer's support with this, too," he said.

One factor that he considered in his decision was the relationship between Martin and Harvick, who have previously worked together - though not for years in Cup. Martin worked with Harvick at the Cup level in 2002 and 2003.

"Those guys already had a relationship," Childress said. "I felt like that was going to be our best opportunity to do better, and Gil and Todd both will be working close together on making sure both of these teams get better."

Martin seems confident that can happen. After two years of working with Bowyer, with whom he finished fifth in the standings last season, he's optimistic the group can do well.

And he fully supports Childress' decision to realign the teams in an effort to become more competitive.

"Richard thinks this stuff out on how he wants to see stuff happen and what's going on," he said. "From the outside looking in, I'm sure it's a strange turn of events in a lot of ways. If you're there on a day-to-day basis and internally and you see everything that is going on, this is all doing nothing but just mixing groups of people together. … It's mixing philosophies together, I guess, and because of that, being from the inside, it's a lot easier to see this isn't that big of a deal.

"It's really not because of how all four teams, everybody sets their cars up no further away than we do in the garage area right here every week, so everybody knows what's going on. It's just different directions everybody's going in. It's going to be good for us. It will be good for Casey, and in the long run it's going to be good for Clint and Jeff."

As they work to improve the overall organization by upping the performance of each of its members, the groups say they weren't that surprised to see the change. Childress has previously moved around crew chiefs, most notably in 1998, when he moved Dale Earnhardt's crew chief, Larry McReynolds, to Mike Skinner's team and gave Earnhardt Kevin Hamlin, from Skinner's team.

So the crews were not that surprised to see some sort of change being made in an effort to get everything on track.

“I’ve worked here for 15 years, and this is not the first time this has happened at our place, and history typically repeats itself," Berrier said. "You go back and look at a calendar and you can pretty well figure it out. There’s some shock in it eventually – maybe the first couple minutes or something – but when it’s all said and done, it’s nothing to be surprised of. Like I said, if it never happened before, it might be one thing, but being [that] it’s happened a time or two over the course of several years, I mean, it’s no big surprise.”

For Childress, it's just a chance to get his teams back to victory lane - and back in Chase form.

"I think you're going to see a difference," he said.

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