Richard Petty Motorsports has announced that veteran crew chief Kevin
“Bono” Manion will serve as crew chief of the No. 9 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Ford
driven by Sam Hornish, Jr. Manion replaces Drew Blickensderfer, who has been
offered another position within the organization, and will be atop the pit box this
weekend at Kansas Speedway.
Manion, a native of Boylston, Mass., is a championship-winning
crew chief and helped lead Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing to wins in both the Daytona
500 and the Brickyard 400 in 2010. Manion has five career wins in the Sprint
Cup Series and 15 in the NASCAR XFINITY Series.
He worked with driver Martin Truex, Jr. in both his XFINITY and Sprint
Cup Series career, earning a pair of XFINITY Series championships. He
also led Jamie McMurray to four Sprint Cup Series wins.
"We began the season with changes to the No. 9 race team,
most notably with the addition of Sam as our driver," said Sammy Johns,
Director of Competition for RPM. "We are now looking to give Sam all the
tools he needs to be successful. We feel that Kevin will bring in some
new ideas to help better our performance. We welcome him to the
Petty family."
A new crew chief may help some. Sam's season has been awful with exception of the two superspeedway races. I wish all of the Ford teams could get together and use the Roush Yates engines along with the Penske chassis. The Roush chassis has been lacking for way too long and for some reason their engineering personnel are unable to figure it out. Let's stop letting all of the Hendrick Chevrolets win all of the championships!!
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Ford is really into nascar racing any longer , They put some money into Penske but it seems a half hearted effort when compared to Chevrolets number of teams . What would the Woods team do without Ford ? There is still more mfgs that could come to nascar , but it feel odd to not have the Chevrolet / Ford contest .
Delete