Bowyer: Childress team improving

For the first time since 2004, RCR is about to reach the halfway point of the season without scoring a single victory. Jeff Burton ranks as the best from his team in the championship in 15th place, 46 points off from making it back inside the top 12.

Bowyer, who ranks 16th behind Burton after scoring his best result for the past ten races with an eighth place at Infineon Raceway, says his recent results show that the team has already found a cure to the technical issues that have hampered their season lately.

"I think we have stopped the bleeding a little bit," said Bowyer. "We got going the wrong way in the points there and stopped the bleeding, got things pointed back in the right direction and I think we have got four Top-12s here in a row.

"So definitely got the consistency back that we are made out of and hopefully we'll start our march back into inside the Chase here in the next few weeks.

This year RCR added a fourth team to its operation, moving Bowyer from the #07 team to the new #33 car, while Casey Mears took over his previous ride. Despite the additional challenges that the growth has posed, Bowyer doesn't believe that the fourth team has been part of the cause for the team's drop in performance.

"I don't think adding a fourth team had anything to do with it," Bowyer said. "If anything it helped. If anything it's given us a lot more inside information as a group, as a whole, that we can lean on. I fell like we've got -- kind of chasing down the wrong path.

"Kevin [Harvick] last year at the end of the year was really running good and they were on some drastically different things that we were running at the time, so we all kind of over the off-season put a lot of -- our eggs in that one basket, hopefully that being the answer for the year starting off strong. It just wasn't.

"So we have had to drop back and punt so to speak. We have had to come back and cut our cars up and change front clips, change body designs around, aero designs around, whatever the changes were. It takes time to get those all acclimated and back in place as a group and as a whole so we can all get back to running well."

While Burton and Bowyer remain in position of making the Chase for the Sprint Cup, Casey Mears is 21st in the points while Kevin Harvick is having his worst season ever, ranking 25th in the standings.

Bowyer is confident that both him and Burton will be in position to be fighting for the championship as they've both done for the past two seasons.

"I'm fairly confident we can get at least two of us in," Bowyer said. "You know, Burton has been on a little bit of a down slide but I feel like we with the 33 team have really capitalized on learning some things and had a good, at least a solid last four weeks."

Both in 2007 and 2008, all three RCR drivers were in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, with Harvick finishing fourth in the points two years ago and Bowyer taking third place last year.