The Hendrick Motorsports teammates are beginning a six-race stint without crew chiefs Steve Letarte (Gordon) and Chad Knaus (Johnson). Both were suspended for six weeks and fined $100,000 in the aftermath of their cars failing inspection last week at Sonoma, Calif.

In both cases, the deep Hendrick team — with more than 500 employees to choose from — decided to name the car chiefs on Gordon's No. 24 Chevrolet and Johnson's No. 48 as interim crew chiefs.

Jeff Meendering will take over on top of the pit box for Letarte and Ron Malec will do the same for Knaus, while also continuing to go over the wall during pit stops in his role as tire changer.

"We all have to step up a little bit and it's going to be hard to replace a crew chief by me just stepping up and saying 'I'm crew chief' because I still have other jobs to do on the car and all my guys still do their normal jobs, which we do 100 percent every week," Malec said. "It's going to be a disadvantage to us for sure.

"I've talked to my guys and they're all behind me 100 percent on their decision to make me the crew chief and we still have a lot of support from other team members, other (Hendrick) teams."

Meendering said the biggest challenge for him in his new role is dealing with the media.

"We've got so much depth in our organization," he said. "We've beefed up our track support a little bit, brought a few extra guys with us and I think it's going to be just as smooth as it's ever been."

For the drivers, the biggest change will be in their communication with the pits.

"It's just getting used to dealing with somebody else on the radio," Gordon said. "It's all about communication when you're trying to fine-tune the car. It's about giving good information and getting good feedback from one another and just building the chemistry and that's something that Steve (Letarte) and I did immediately.

"We had great chemistry and so now I have to do that with Jeff Meendering and, so far, it's gone very well. I mean he's very in tune with what goes on with this team, with our setups, and he and Steve are really close so they can communicate a lot with the preparation coming into the weekend."