Right on Track
TONY STEWART
Right on Track
KANNAPOLIS, N.C. (March 3, 2010) – Three races into the 2010 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season and Tony Stewart is right on track.
Stewart has piloted his No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice Chevrolet Impala to 11th in the championship driver standings, where he is only 120 points behind series leader Kevin Harvick. Back-to-back top-10 results at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif., and Las Vegas Motor Speedway, respectively, have allowed Stewart to gain 12 point positions since finishing 22nd in the season-opening Daytona 500.
While they’re not wins, the strong efforts of late have Stewart upbeat as he enters round 4 of 36 this weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway. That’s because Fontana and Las Vegas are bellwether tracks for how one will perform at many of the other intermediate tracks that make up the majority of the Sprint Cup schedule.
Run well at Fontana and Las Vegas, the theory goes, and you’ll run well at such stops as Atlanta, Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway and Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn – all tracks Stewart and his Sprint Cup counterparts will visit in the next four months.
It’s where seasons are shaped, for better or worse, with Atlanta being the next litmus test for teams via this weekend’s Kobalt Tools 500.
Stewart has two wins at the ultra-fast 1.54-mile oval, the first coming in the 2002 spring race and the latter coming in the 2006 fall race, where the two-time Sprint Cup champion showed off his version of Oktoberfest by leading seven times for a race-high 146 laps. Stewart followed up that win with another victory the very next week at Texas, the sister track to Atlanta.
Stewart continued his up-front ways when he returned to Atlanta the following March. In just the fifth race of the 2007 season, Stewart battled with Jimmie Johnson and led five times for 121 laps before finishing second to him. And in a case of déjà vu, Stewart finished second again, this time to Kyle Busch, when the series returned to Atlanta in March 2008.
But perhaps Stewart’s biggest test at Atlanta came last March, where in his first visit to the track as a driver/owner he came from two laps down to finish an impressive eighth. It was Stewart’s 13th top-10 finish in 21 career starts at Atlanta.
“There are a lot of guys that had problems today and never recovered from it,” said Stewart immediately after last year’s Kobalt Tools 500. “We got two laps down and fought our way back. At this place, that is hard to do. There are not very many guys that can come back from two laps down like that, so I am really proud of the team.”
With a history of strong runs at Atlanta, especially recently, Stewart is intent on continuing to prove his worth as a driver/owner by taking care of business in Atlanta.
TONY STEWART, Driver of the No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing:
When you look back on your first year as a driver/owner, is there any particular thing that you feel warrants a pat on the back?
“I think you’re always looking at things that you can do better. I think the one thing that I felt like I could pat myself on the back for is having assembled such a fine group of people. I don’t feel like I could’ve found anybody better than Bobby (Hutchens) as our competition director. I feel like having Tony Gibson and Darian Grubb are the two best fits for the crew chief positions. And, obviously, Ryan (Newman), our relationship over the year, I’ve had more fun with Ryan than I’ve had in a long time, and I’ve had a lot of great teammates that I’ve had a lot of fun with. Ryan and I are just a great fit and I think that’s the one thing that as the year kept going on and the relationships between this group kept getting stronger and building, that I was really proud of and felt fortunate I was able to get this particular group of people together and knowing how well we work together. It’s really hard in this business to get a group of guys who really click with each other, and I feel like that’s something we have is a core group of people who really have the same vision, have the same passion and have the relationship that we have, and that’s what I really felt proud about at the end of the season.”
What makes Atlanta different from a lot of the other 1.5-mile ovals the Sprint Cup Series visits?
“The neat thing is that the times fall off so guys move around on the racetrack more. Everybody starts at the bottom, and the fast guys normally end up right around the wall midway through a run. That is something that is different than Charlotte and some of the other tracks on the circuit. I like having the flexibility to be able to move around. I know that if my car isn’t driving all that well in a particular spot that I have the flexibility as a driver to move around on the racetrack. You can make a difference. It’s like Michigan where you can move around and help yourself as a driver, versus being committed and whatever you’ve got, you’ve got. It does make you feel better as a driver to know you have that flexibility.”
How fine of a line is it to find a comfort level when you’re out on the racetrack at speed, particularly at Atlanta when you’re running over 200 mph?
“Well, I don’t know that it’s a fine line. I mean, either you’re comfortable or you’re not. Nothing is happening this year that hasn’t happened for 100 years in racing. There’s nothing magical or mysterious going on here. Everybody is going out every week and we’re working with technology, but still at the end of the day, you’ve got a driver that’s driving the car. No matter how fast the computer says that car is going to be, if that driver is not comfortable driving it, then they’re not going to go fast. So you’ve got to tune these cars to the drivers and their feels, and that’s what makes them go fast.”
Despite the history of good racing at Atlanta, the track has struggled to sell all of its tickets, as have some other tracks on the Sprint Cup circuit. Do you think it’s because of the economy, or are there other factors at play?
“Everyone wants to do their part to make it better, and I’m not sure we know exactly what that answer is. But our intentions are to do what we can to help make it a better experience for the fans every week. It’s one thing for the economy to be bad, but we’re competing in a time where everything is on the Internet and there are so many things for people to do. The simplest part about what we do here every weekend is we’re in the entertainment industry, and we’re competing against everybody else, whether it’s high school football on Friday night or whatever. We’re trying to figure out how we get these people to come watch us do what we love to do. And that’s the challenge for track owners and sanctioning bodies. It’s ‘How do you make it better?’ When the economy is bad like this, it’s that much tougher of a challenge. You try and find more ways to make it more efficient for the people to come watch us do what we love to do every week.”