Mayfield On Thin Ice At Evernham?

Jeremy Mayfield recently vented about his season with Ray Evernham Motorsports in a tone reminiscent of his public rebuke of Penske Racing at Kansas in 2001 when the Penske organization brought an uncompetitive short track car for Mayfield to drive. In that 2001 weekend Mayfield popped off about the whole situation, and by the next race he was gone from the Penske organization.

Now, in his fifth season with Evernham, Mayfield may be on thin ice, mired outside the top thirty in points and unable to get anything started. Mayfield's comments about the Evernham fleet's Firecracker 400 weekend were restarting what was pretty obvious, but the deeper cut came from Mayfield's criticism of the attention Evernham pays to the organization.

Now given the success of Kasey Kahne and also the surprising rebound of Scott Riggs, it would be unfair to suggest Evernham hasn't paid attention to things within his fleet. And Mayfield's sour grapes come after four years of struggle in which he's never elevated his driving nor shown any special cooperative chemistry with his teammates of the kind that would improve all the Evernham cars. The best contrast is with the Petty Dodges that get Evernham engines and work with the Evernham organization - here Bobby Labonte's driving style and personality mesh with Kyle Petty's to where the feedback necessary to improve the cars is strong; in his four years with Evernham I've never seen any particular benefit in information exchange coming from Mayfield to the organization.

It certainly is not that Mayfield can't win races, since he's done so five times from his breakthrough at the 1998 Pocono 500 onward - he's won twice at Pocono and once apiece at Fontana, Richmond, and Michigan. Though he's won races, that hasn't elevated his overall racing; he is perhaps the best example of a fundamental weakness in the Chase For The Championship playoff format - he made the Chase in 2004 and 2005 and immediately disappeared both times; under previous point packages he would have easily fallen out of the top ten in points both times.

And his criticism of Evernham's attention to the organization isn't entirely unfounded - his effort invested in Erin Crocker has gone nowhere and one is hard-pressed to ever see Erin Crocker amounting to anything in racing as her driving is consistently timid, her judgement frequently questionable (her involvement in numerous wrecks constitutes the best proof of that), and her potential not enough to inspire much confidence - her record in ARCA where she has yet to win despite usually having better racecars than ARCA regulars does not suggest any real upside to Crocker as a racer.

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So the question becomes - if Mayfield winds up gone from Evernham, where will he go? An easy bet is one of the Toyota startups, as established GM, Ford, and Dodge teams don't show any openings now or forseeable for 2007.

Whatever happens, it will be another chapter in a career that has been rather curious in recent NASCAR history.