One-car teams are dying a slow death in Winston Cup racing and have been for several years.
Larry McClure's one-car team,...
Larry McClure's one-car team, which fields the No. 4 Pontiac, won 14races between 1990 and 1998 but has been winless since.
As multi-car teams have found their way to victory lane, single-car teams have, conversely, found the path to success more and more difficult. Of the 10 race winners during the 1993 season, for example, seven were from one-car teams, including Rusty Wallace and Dale Earnhardt, the top winners that season. Just five years later, though, the trend had reversed, with seven of the 11 race winners coming from multi-car teams, including Hendrick Motorsports' Jeff Gordon, who led the way with 13 wins, and Roush Racing's Mark Martin, whose seven victories were second on the list.
Eleven different drivers won during the 1999 season and 14 in 2000, but none were from one-car teams. A record 19 different drivers won in 2001 but only one, Elliott Sadler, was from a single-car team. Sadler's employer at the time, however, was Wood Brothers Racing, which has had an alliance with Roush Racing for several years.
Following Sadler's win at Bristol in March of 2001, nearly two years passed before another single-car team found victory lane. That came during March of this year when Ricky Craven put the Cal Wells No. 32 Pontiac into victory lane at Darlington, nine days shy of the two-year anniversary of Sadler's Bristol win. Note, though, that Craven barely beat Kurt Busch of the Roush Racing juggernaut.
Buoyed by the Darlington victory, Craven spent several weeks in the Top 10 in points during the early part of the season--Wells' first with Pontiac after fielding Fords for three seasons.
"To be honest," says Wells, "I think that if we were a two-car team we would be running that much better with Pontiac."
Wells actually fielded a two-car team for half of the 2001 season, before sponsor McDonald's pulled out, forcing the team to go back to the one-car concept. Wells, in an attempt to grow his team back to two cars, has searched for additional sponsorship since the McDonald's pullout, to no avail.