Kevin Harvick drove to the 2014 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship driving a Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet which acquired many of its under the hood products from Hendrick Motorsports.
That has Joe Gibbs Racing driver Kyle Busch calling for his team to work more closely with a fellow Toyota team in Michael Waltrip Racing.
“We have four cars going next year and in reality we should have six, no ifs, ands, or buts,” Busch said Monday. “We need to have as much as we can have.”
Busch sees Hendick Motorsports and Stewart-Haas racing as one large eight-car team as Stewart-Haas Racing acquires both chassis and engines from Hendrick. The two teams also share information between themselves.
“We need to have an affiliation,” said Busch. “It would be nice if MWR … made us all eight. It would be better for all of us. There’s a couple of reasons that we’re fighting internally why we’re not mingling with those guys quite yet, but hopefully that gets resolved here soon.”
Busch currently listed the cooperation between JGR and MRW as informal.
“You’ve got to work from one thing,’’ said Busch, who finished 10th in the points. “Everybody has got to decide what we’re all going to use. Are we going to use JGR or MWR chassis? Are we going to use JGR or MWR bodies? Are we going to use JGR or MWR chassis simulations? What are we going to use? Then we just need to go with it and be done with it.”
A year after Matt Kenseth won a series high seven races last year, Toyota drivers totaled just two wins in 2014 with Busch and teammate Denny Hamlin each winning one. The two wins for JGR drivers were the fewest for the organization since 2004.
Hendrick Motorsports scored 13 wins with Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. each winning four times and Kasey Kahne winning once. Stewart-Haas Racing had six wins with Harvick winning five times and Kurt Busch once.
