Joey Logano the big winner in latest crew chief shuffle

The crew chief dominoes continue to fall this offseason as Tony Stewart got his right-hand man back on his team and Joey Logano might have found his winning partner.

Longtime crew chief of the #20 car Greg Zipadelli announced his move Friday to Stewart-Haas Racing where he will serve as competition director and interim crew chief for Danica Patrick.

To fill Zipadelli’s old spot atop the #20 pit box, Joe Gibbs Racing promoted Jason Ratcliff to be the crew chief for Joey Logano in 2012.

Ratcliff moves up after seven years as crew chief for the #18 Joe Gibbs Racing Nationwide Series team.

Two major names in NASCAR, Stewart and Patrick, may have gotten the man they wanted for their team, but Logano might be the driver who benefits the most from this switch.

Don’t get me wrong, Zipadelli will likely be excellent in his job as competition director and crew chief for Patrick. Zipadelli has been one of the best crew chiefs in the sport for more than a decade, and he will surely mesh well with Stewart and his organization.

Believe it or not, the Zipadelli-Stewart duo was not far behind the Gordon-Evernham and Johnson-Knaus pairings.

Stewart won 33 races and two championships with Zipadelli as his crew chief, the most success any driver not named Jimmie Johnson has had since Stewart entered the sport in 1999.

However, life has not been so wonderful for Zipadelli since Stewart left to form his own team in 2008. A young Logano jumped into the #20 Home Depot Toyota full time in 2009 and went on to win one fuel-mileage race that year. He hasn’t won since and has not finished higher than 16th in the points standings.

The adjustment had to be difficult for Zipadelli. He went from calling the shots for one of the greatest drivers of his generation to trying to develop the best thing since sliced bread. The problem was that normal sliced bread isn’t that amazing.

Logano has talent, no doubt, and he has won nine races in his four seasons in the Nationwide Series. But he came into the Sprint Cup Series as an 18-year-old who had not even competed in a full Nationwide Series season, and at times he has looked overwhelmed on the Cup side.

NASCAR drivers, like any other professional athlete, need time to develop. That’s a large part of why the truck and Nationwide series exist. Sure, Stewart achieved success in NASCAR pretty quickly, but he a substantial background in other forms of racing and was 28 years old by the time he was a rookie in the Sprint Cup Series.

Logano won't reach that age until 2018, and he still has a very bright future ahead of him.

That’s why it is important for Gibbs to bring in a guy such as Ratcliff now to work with Logano. Ratcliff has worked with plenty of young drivers, including Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin, during his time in the Nationwide Series and would figure to be a much better fit than Zipadelli for a driver such as Logano.

This is the type of change Logano needed. He obviously wasn’t getting anywhere fast in his current situation, and now he might have the chance to settle in and steadily develop as the top-tier driver everyone thought they would see when he first entered the Cup series.

The #20 might not compete for a championship in 2012, but it should be toward the front of the field a lot more often.

Darian Grubb exactly what Joe Gibbs Racing needed

After winning a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship and losing his job in the same week, Darian Grubb has found a new pit box for 2012.

Grubb will be the crew chief for Denny Hamlin’s #11 team after Stewart-Haas Racing released him following his championship run with Tony Stewart. Joe Gibbs Racing released Hamlin's former crew chief, Mike Ford, on Tuesday.

Grubb's presence could make a huge difference in the performance of not only the #11 team, but also the entire Joe Gibbs Racing organization.

This wasn’t a stellar season for Gibbs by any means. Sure, two of his three cars made the Chase, but neither Hamlin nor Kyle Busch ever posed much of a threat to the final championship contenders.

Joe Gibbs Racing is one of the big-time organizations. There are haves and have-nots in the sport, and Gibbs is certainly one of the haves. But, this year it was on the lower end of the haves, especially after Hamlin narrowly missed winning the championship and beating Jimmie Johnson just one year ago.

Many people in the sport had high expectations coming into the season for Hamlin, as well as the #18 and #20 Gibbs cars driven by Busch and Joey Logano, respectively.

Hamlin was supposed to strongly contend for the title this season after finishing second and having eight wins in 2010.

This was supposed to be the year of the new Kyle Busch, and this was supposed to be the year Logano became a star in the Cup series and contend for a Chase spot after he posted five top-10s in the final six races to close out 2010.

Instead, Hamlin finished ninth in the points standings with only one win. Busch finished 12th, or last in the Chase, and got himself in enough trouble for NASCAR to park him for the Chase race at Texas and his sponsor to pull its logos off the car for the final two weeks of the season.

Logano never even contended. He finished 24th in the points, nearly lost his job to Carl Edwards and his crew chief, Greg Zipadelli, might be looking to leave the #20 team.

So here comes Darian Grubb, the defending championship crew chief who spent several years working on the #48 team and won the 2006 Daytona 500 with Johnson while regular crew chief Chad Knaus was suspended.

Grubb won’t bring the Hendrick Motorspots books with him to Gibbs, but he will bring in some outside knowledge that is bound to help an organization that struggled with bad-handling cars and engine issues for much of the season.

While Grubb is surely relieved to have found a crew chief job with a high-caliber race team, Gibbs should be more relieved to have found a person with Grubb’s knowledge and experience to help right the ship at JGR.

One person doesn’t usually come in a change an entire organization, but Grubb could be a huge step toward getting JGR back to where it was just a year ago. His hire could also be a big help to Toyota teams, in general, and they need help.

Toyota, which fielded nine full-time cars this season, finished third in the manufacturer’s standings and had just one more win than the five victories scored by the three full-time Dodge teams.

Joe Gibbs Racing and Toyota had a lot of work to do this offseason to become competitive again on a regular basis, but signing Grubb will go a long way toward getting Toyota back to the front.