Jeff Hammond: What NASCAR hiring Scott Miller as senior VP of competition really means

As reported earlier Wednesday, Scott Miller has replaced Robin Pemberton as senior vice president of competition at NASCAR, effective immediately.

For the past four years, Scott has been executive vice president of competition for Michael Waltrip Racing.

What I can draw from this move by NASCAR is that the sanctioning body was looking for someone who had a little bit newer and more current experience with the race teams in the garage to fill that role.

Robin, like me, has been around the sport a long, long time. As much as you try to keep up with everything, sometimes management simply is looking for newer, fresher ideas, and I would wager this is the case here.

Many of you may not know that in addition to MWR, Scott also worked at Richard Childress Racing and he's had a lot of success at both those organizations.

I think Scott's engineering approaches might be more relevant and current to today's style of NASCAR. Scott has a ton of experience of not only being a crew chief but also a team manager and, as mentioned, director of competition. It's my belief that Scott Miller will fill the role quite nicely.