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NASCAR

Bliss believes Phoenix Racing can thrive as an independent

By SceneDaily.com

Jan 27, 2009

No independent team has won a championship in what is now known as the NASCAR Nationwide Series since 2000, but Mike Bliss believes he and his Phoenix Racing team have a chance to do just that this season.

“I think we’ve got just as good a shot as everybody else,” Bliss said. “The biggest thing is getting out of the first three or four races and getting good momentum going. If you start off slow there, it kind of hurts you. If we can win that first race early in the year, that’s going to be a big momentum builder, because that first race always seems to be the toughest.”

Bliss believes he and the team have come a long way since joining forces early in the 2008 campaign.

Six races into last season, Bliss was fifth in the points standings after posting two top-10 finishes with Fitz Motorsports, but he then turned a lot heads as he left the team. Thanks to either good luck or foresight, he landed with Phoenix Racing, where he finished the season – fifth in the points standings.

“It was good fortune,” Bliss said recently. “It was, ‘Wow, what am I going to do?’ And then this. It was just one of those deals that doesn’t happen very often.”

Bliss counts his blessings for landing at James Finch’s Phoenix team. Johnny Sauter started the year in the car but was replaced after the fifth race. So after Bliss left Fitz, the Phoenix opening was perfect for him.

Phoenix had gone through a couple different crew chiefs before general manager Marc Reno reassumed the role the week before Bliss joined the team. And the Bliss/Reno pairing worked well, as Bliss posted two top-five and 13 top-10 finishes in the remaining 29 races.

“It just worked out that our sponsor wanted to make a change, and I guess word got out in the garage that that was going to happen,” Phoenix Racing General Manager Steve Barkdoll said. “[Bliss] knew that we had good stuff and were working with Hendrick [Motorsports] on our stuff. He put a call out to James.

“There were a lot of people who wanted the ride, and we talked to a lot of people. But we looked at Mike’s record and anything he’s ever driven. He seemed to be a really good fit for us.”

Bliss, 43, won the 2002 Truck series championship and has 13 victories in that series. He also has a win in the series now known as the Nationwide Series when he drove for Joe Gibbs Racing in 2004.

Bliss also has 82 starts in the Cup series, posting a best finish of fourth at the second Richmond race for JGR in 2004.

And while finishing fifth in one of NASCAR’s three national series – as he did in 2008 – should garner lots of attention, Bliss seemed to slip under the radar. Phoenix is an independent Nationwide team, doing most of the work on its cars by itself.

Bliss was the top driver in the final 2008 standings who drove for an independent team, but he doesn’t look at himself as first in class.

“I have crew chiefs and friends with big teams, and they say, ‘Man, you guys are running good,’” Bliss said. “But as a driver, I don’t think it’s good enough. Even our owner wants more. We all want more. When I came into this team, we got better and better and better. We were happy the first race with 10th, eighth and seventh. Now, at the end of the year, we were not happy with finishing Homestead in 13th place.

“It’s tough. We try to keep everything in-house. We don’t try to spend a lot of money in our shop. But it does reflect on finishing. Our team is kind of the way Nationwide teams were five years ago.”

Bliss said much of the success of Phoenix Racing can be traced to Reno, who understands the basics of racing and race cars as well as anyone.

“Marc is a person that you go to when things aren’t right,” Bliss said. “He gets you back on basic ground. He’s not going to stick his neck out and do something different. He’s good at getting back to baseline, and that’s what they got back to when I got there. Now, we’re trying to get better than that.”

The Bliss/Phoenix union seems to work, Barkdoll said, because both Finch and Bliss are racers.

“We’re a standalone team down here in Spartanburg, S.C., and one thing that always seems to still work is if you go back to basics, you’ve got a guy who’s a root-and-gouge type of racer and an owner that just wants to race up front. It seems to work,” Barkdoll said.

The basics work fine, but “it’s not basic anymore,” Bliss said.

“They had two different crew chiefs at the start of the year, so each crew chief has a different idea on spindles, setups,” he said. “They pretty much went back to what they knew and started from there, and it worked. That old saying, ‘Everybody skins a cat a different way,’ it’s how you get there is the biggest thing.”

Getting there means the Nationwide championship, a title that may seem out of reach to a smaller team such as Phoenix. An independent team hasn’t won the No. 2 series championship since Jeff Green won it for ppc Racing in 2000.

And these days, the series often seems to be dominated by top Sprint Cup drivers such as Roush Fenway Racing’s Carl Edwards (2007 champ), Richard Childress Racing’s Clint Bowyer and Joe Gibbs Racing’s Kyle Busch, but Barkdoll thinks Bliss is capable of challenging them.

“I’ve worked in this sport for 20 years, and even though Mike’s older than these young guys coming in, if you look at what he did when he got in our car, we were really a top-six or -seven car every week with him,” Barkdoll said. “The ones who beat us were Kyle, Carl and Clint, and if you think about it, they beat everybody. … To compete against those guys, Mike Bliss is as good as anybody else there to do that.”