TONY STEWART
Say It Can't Be Done-- I Dare You
KANNAPOLIS, N.C. (Oct. 14, 2009) -- As baseball's post-season heats up,
NASCAR's appears to be cooling down, at least if you believe that Jimmie
Johnson has all but wrapped up a fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup
Series championship.
Yes, he's leading the points and yes he's coming off a win at Auto Club
Speedway in Fontana, Calif., but there are still six races remaining
in the 10-race Chase, and three other drivers are within 100 points
of Johnson, one of whom is Tony Stewart, driver of the No. 14 Old
Spice/Office Depot Chevrolet Impala SS for Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR).
And when a total of 161 points can be won or lost in a single race, this
year's title is far from over.
The halfway point of the Chase comes this Saturday night with the NASCAR
Banking 500 at Lowe's Motor Speedway near Charlotte, N.C. And yes,
Johnson has five career Sprint victories at Charlotte, but Stewart is no
slouch at the 1.5-mile oval either.
Witness his win in this year's NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race, where he
led the race's final two laps to score the first win of any kind for
SHR. Witness also his victory at Charlotte in October 2003-- and his six
top-fives, 11 top-10s and 598 laps led in 21 career Sprint Cup starts
at Charlotte. And remember the seemingly surefire victory in the 2008
Coca-Cola 600, where Stewart started 31st yet powered his way to lead
four times for 23 laps and open up a five-and-a-half second advantage
over second-place Kasey Kahne, only to see it vanish three laps short of
the finish when he suffered a flat right-front? In an instant, victory
turned into an 18th-place finish.
So, pardon the chip resting on Stewart's broad shoulders, for the
first-year driver/owner has done what no driver/owner has done since
Alan Kulwicki did in 1992 -- contend for a Sprint Cup championship.
Remember last year when Stewart decided to leave the comfy confines
of Joe Gibbs Racing, where he won 33 Sprint Cup races and two
championships, and people openly questioned whether he'd ever win again,
never mind place himself in the thick of a title hunt? Stewart responded
by taking the point lead after round 13 at Dover (Del.) International
Speedway and building that lead to as high as 260 points thanks to
impressive wins at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway in June, Daytona (Fla.)
International Speedway in July and Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International in
August.
And remember when that massive point margin was erased following the
regular season cutoff race at Richmond (Va.) International Raceway and
Stewart actually dropped to second in the standings, 10 points behind
Chase leader Mark Martin? He responded by winning the third Chase race
at Kansas Speedway in Kansas Speedway and providing a reminder that
Johnson's fourth title is anything but a sure thing.
Yet here we are again, with talk that this year's title race is already
decided. That's like saying that even with two divisional series and a
World Series still to play that the Yankees are this year's World Series
champions. The Angels, Phillies and Dodgers might have something to say
about that, just like Stewart, Juan Pablo Montoya and Martin have their
respective eyes on claiming this year's Sprint Cup title for themselves.
The NASCAR Banking 500 provides another opportunity for Stewart and his
counterparts to usurp Johnson from his perch atop the points. And you
can take that to the bank.
TONY STEWART, Driver of the No. 14 Old Spice/Office Depot Chevrolet
Impala SS for Stewart-Haas Racing:
You're fourth in points, 84 points behind Johnson. Can you still win
this championship and collect your third career Sprint Cup title?
"My standpoint has always been, until they say that you're
mathematically out of it, you always have a shot. We won the USAC Silver
Crown Series championship in '95, and we were the third driver of three
that had a shot, mathematically, to win it. There were two drivers, Jack
Hewitt and Dave Darland, that were neck-and-neck in the point standings,
and we were kind of the third wheel. We were only included in the
group media sessions because we were mathematically in the hunt. Both
of those drivers ended up having problems in the race, and we won the
championship by two points. You realize when you use that experience,
knowing that as long as you're mathematically in the hunt, you still
have a shot. If we have a chance to win the championship at the end,
trust me, we're all for that and we would love nothing more than that.
But I think right now where we're at and how many points we need to make
up, I think it lets us have a go-for-broke attitude and just go out
and try to do what we did at Kansas and win races. I've always said,
if you win races, the points will take care of itself. We could still,
by theory, win the next six races in a row and still not win the point
championship. For us, it's about going out and doing what we can do, and
the other 11 drivers are going to dictate their fates, too."
Because Johnson has been so successful and because he's back atop the
point standings, is he the guy to beat for the championship?
"I don't feel like that's the only guy we're worrying about. I feel like
we've got to worry about Mark (Martin) just as much and Juan (Montoya)
just as much. Right now, we've got a bunch of guys that are consistent
every week. You can't just narrow it down to one right now."
After finishing 14th and ninth, respectively, in the first two Chase
races at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon and Dover (Del.)
International Speedway, you rebounded in decisive fashion with your win
at Kansas. What did that performance say about your Old Spice/Office
Depot team?
"I'm really proud of Darian Grubb (crew chief) and all the guys on this
Old Spice/Office Depot team. There is no quit in this team at all. We
just keep digging. I don't care what it takes. I don't care if we have
to go 12 laps down and have the right side knocked off of it, if it gets
us a top-five at the end of the day, that's what we have to do the rest
of the season. At the end of the day, no matter what the circumstance
that got us behind, we've been able to rebound from it -- not get all
the way up to where we wanted, but we were able to make gains on it at
the end and salvage a better finish than where we were. Whatever the
scenarios were, we were able to overcome part of it. As long as you do
that, then at the end of the day the facts just shows this team doesn't
have any quit in them, and that's what it's going to take to get back on
top
Of the upcoming tracks in the final six races on this year's schedule,
which one are you looking forward to the most?
"I think this weekend, in all reality. This weekend and Martinsville,
Talladega, Texas and Phoenix are places where we've had a lot of
success, but I think the way that we've ran the last couple of races at
Charlotte here, we're pretty excited about it. I feel like we've got a
shot at this weekend's race. If we can do what we've been doing, we've
got just as good a shot as anybody else."
You've had a handful of races in your career that you feel like you
should've won, but is the 2008 Coca-Cola 600 the one that sticks out
most?
"Yeah, that's definitely the one that sticks out the most in my mind.
I mean, we had a five-second lead with three laps to go. We lost the
right-front tire, but it wasn't because of a mistake by Goodyear, it was
the fact that we had run 100 laps on the right side tire, so it just
physically melted the bead on the right-front. So it wasn't any fault of
Goodyear's, it was just circumstances."
-credit: shr
