CONCORD, N.C. -- Casey Mears pulled his black race car into a dark corner of the garage area at Lowe's Motor Speedway, slid out from behind the wheel, and pulled on a knit cap to ward off the cold. Crew members immediately began scurrying around the vehicle, removing pieces and preparing it for transport back to the Richard Childress Racing shop.

Mears doesn't know if he'll be working with the same men next year. In fact, he doesn't even know if he'll have a car to drive. With sponsor Jack Daniel's leaving after this season and Childress in need of funding to keep his fourth car afloat, Mears isn't sure what the ensuing months hold for him, or whether his team as he knows it will remain intact for the 2010 campaign.

“

I really hope we [stay together], because I really enjoy racing here. I love racing for this company.

”

-- CASEY MEARS

"All I can do is the best I can do every week," he said. "I really hope we [stay together], because I really enjoy racing here. I love racing for this company. We've had better cars than we've finished probably the last six or eight races. We're just now starting to see the results. It's fun. I'm having a good time. No mater what happens, I'm having fun the remainder of the year."

Especially after nights like Saturday, when Mears recorded his second-highest finish of the season. A two-tire call in the waning laps gave the No. 07 track position, and Mears held on to place seventh on the 1.5-mile surface. Quietly, the Bakersfield, Calif., native is enjoying a nice little stretch run, finishing worse than 17th only twice since the Aug. 9 event at Watkins Glen International.

But Charlotte finally brought the breakthrough he had been looking for, netting the team's best finish since a sixth-place result at Michigan.

"We've been a top 10 car every race since Watkins Glen," crew chief Todd Berrier said. "We had one bad race in here somewhere, I think it was Atlanta. The rest of them, we were good. We just have not finished where we've run. And again [Saturday], we were probably a little better than we finished, but we finally finished in the top 10."

Mears endured a difficult start to the season, not necessarily surprising for a driver with his fifth program -- the No. 07 at RCR, preceded by the No. 5 at Hendrick Motorsports, the No. 25 at Hendrick, the No. 42 at Chip Ganassi Racing, and the No. 41 at Ganassi -- in as many years. Although the Childress cars as a whole have experienced some modest improvement as a result of team management changes, Berrier said he's hit on a reliable setup baseline that he can turn to every week.

"We have a baseline that we can come in with that's going to be close," he said. "We didn't come with it here. We were trying to find something we keep trying to find. But we qualified bad, the first day we ran bad, we put everything in we normally run, and thought we were going to be OK. Our baseline is really good, really solid. You've still got to grow on that a little bit. You've got to grow on that a lot to beat [Jimmie Johnson] at the end of the day. You have to crawl before you walk."

"It takes time to get to know everybody, and in the middle of getting to know everybody we're trying to learn what's wrong with our cars," added Mears, who started 42nd. "We're sort of through that now. Now we're gelling. We've got a great group of guys that like working together, and it's just fun. I've got a guy who believes in me and Todd. That's a hard thing. When you have the type of career I've had, it's easy for people to give up on you, because you don't have the credentials. Todd never has, and neither have these guys, and they're giving me what I need to go out and run good."

Will Mears have Berrier and his crew by his side next season? Childress hinted earlier Saturday that more changes are on the way at RCR. He added that there's some sponsor interest in the No. 07, but the car's status for 2010 is still very much uncertain. The team owner said he has sponsorship for a few races next year, but not the full season. Would Mears stick around if he were guaranteed only a partial schedule?

"I'm up to talking about anything," he said. "The biggest thing is, we've just got to do what we're doing. We're making gains. We have a great race team and a lot of guys who believe in each other, and if we can just keep that going, it'll be good."

The decision to field three or four full-time cars for next season will have to be made sometime before Thanksgiving, Childress said. That leaves Berrier, Mears, and the whole No. 07 crew anxious about what's to come.

"The whole team is," Berrier said. "I mean, we're getting ready to mix it all up. At some point you've got to decide, all right, you're going to do three [cars]. If you do that, you've got to decide what to do with your people. We've been meeting on that more than we have on how to make things better, because you're talking about 25 or 30 people's livelihood. That's always a tough deal to be in."

Also: Childress uncertain about No. 07 future | Jack Daniel's leaving