Tony Stewart, driver of the #14 Old Spice Chevrolet, sits in his car during practice for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway. (Photo: Ronald Martinez/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Tony Stewart is making one thing glaringly obvious in the still-early stages of the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season: Before the year is out, the two-time series champion will put his No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet Impala SS in victory lane. It’s only a question of when, not if.
Stewart continued to flash impressive form Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway, where he finished fourth in the Samsung 500 behind Hendrick Motorsports teammates Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson and Roush Fenway Racing’s Greg Biffle.
It was the second consecutive top-five finish for Stewart, who picked up two spots and is now fifth in the Sprint Cup point standings on the basis of five top-10 finishes in seven races.
Considering that SHR is practically a start-up squad, that’s especially impressive. Stewart, who along with Michael Waltrip and Robby Gordon, is one of the few owner/drivers in the Sprint Cup Series, said afterwards that he had something of a Jekyll-Hyde reaction to finishing fourth at Texas.
“The car owner is happy, the driver is ticked off,” Stewart said after the race. “I wanted to win this thing. I felt like we had a shot at it and we did. We were good all day, we were respectable all day and we were good all weekend here. Just got to figure out some little things to make it quicker earlier in the day and earlier in the run and not so fast at the end of a run.”
What kept Stewart out of victory lane on Sunday was that his car was excellent the longer each run went on, but the final green-flag was just 27 laps, not quite enough for his car to come in the way he hoped. “We were really fast from the 30 or so lap mark to the end of the run,” said Stewart. “We’d run those guys down right at the end when it was time to come in and pit. We just couldn’t take off like we wanted to. We just couldn’t get it to take off and be good like we wanted at the beginning of a run, but at the end we were fast.”
