Parrott out before season hits halfway

Don’t set that pen and paper down just yet. More changes are on the way as NASCAR heads into New Hampshire this weekend. This time Matt Kenseth got his fifth crew chief in less than three years.

In a fairly surprising move, Jack Roush pulled Todd Parrott off of the #17 pit box just 15 races after he was sent in to replace Drew Blickensderfer. Parrott came from the research and development program at Roush-Fenway Racing, and to the R & D program he shall return.

What makes this move surprising is that Kenseth is sitting seventh in the points standings, well positioned to make the Chase after missing out the year before. The pair had pretty good runs together, including four top-five and seven top-10 finishes.

Parrott has always taken an aggressive approach to calling a race, and teaming him up with the #17 pit crew looked like a great combination, but there is a zero in the win column. The man replacing Parrott, Jimmy Fennig, is a championship crew chief in his own right. But still, why didn’t this work?

For that matter, why hasn’t Parrott been able to keep a job as a crew chief for one driver for an entire season? He won the 1999 championship with Dale Jarrett and had a fantastic run at Robert Yates Racing with 29 career victories.

Also, Parrott has always been fantastic at restrictor plate tracks, and Daytona is just two weeks away. The pair of Parrott and Yates was Dale Earnhardt Inc.-like in its restrictor plate dominance during the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.

However, since those glory days at Yates, Parrott has moved around as much as any driver during the last decade. In 2006, he moved to Petty Enterprises to work with Bobby Labonte and try to bring that organization back from the irrelevance. That didn’t work, as he left the organization in the middle of the season and returned to Yates.

He stayed at Yates from the end of the 2006 season until the organization merged with Hall of Fame Racing in 2009. Once again, Parrott was paired up with Labonte as they tried to make things work a second time. But, as in 2006, Parrott was replaced before the season was over, and he went to work in Roush’s R & D program.

Now, in 2010, he came in after Daytona to call the shots for Kenseth. Several races this year he has made a call on pit road that has directly led to a good finish for the #17. So why did this come to an end so quickly?

If Parrott would ever stay on one team for an entire season, or maybe even two for that matter, he could lead a team to contend for the championship. Instead, he either moves on or is replaced before the team can really come together as one.

This has been like the Baltimore Orioles replacing their manager every single season. Give the guy time, or for Parrott, give yourself time to get things turned in the right direction. Results don’t happen instantly. It takes time to build something, and Parrott hasn’t been with one team long enough to get any results.

When Jarrett won the championship in 1999, Parrott had been with that team for three full years. A championship isn’t won in one season. It takes time to build up to that level. Even the #48 team had to wait four years before winning its first championship in 2006.

So now Roush will continue to try and find lightning in a bottle with Fennig on the box. Maybe this will work out, but the #17 team probably is looking at a couple of years before it has a legitimate shot at the championship. All the pieces are there, but they have been for some time. They just haven’t stayed together long enough to produce anything.