CUP: Newman, Gibson Seek Share Of Stewart-Haas Glory

Sprint Cup

CUP: Newman, Gibson Seek Share Of Stewart-Haas Glory

While Tony Stewart surged to the 2011 championship, teammate Ryan Newman stumbled badly en route to a 10th-place finish…

Jared Turner | Posted February 01, 2012 Charlotte, NC

Ryan Newman (Left) and crew chief Tony Gibson (Right) have worked together the last three seasons. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

His teammate and boss had won the 2011 Sprint Cup championship but Ryan Newman wasn’t happy.

He just couldn’t be.

Not after Newman and his No. 39 team posted just one top-five in 10 Chase races. And not after finishing 10th out of 12 Chase drivers.

That all this occurred as team co-owner/teammate Tony Stewart staged arguably the most memorable title charge in NASCAR history only made Newman feel worse – at least at first.

“After Homestead it took me until the night of the banquet to actually feel like I was part of a championship team,” Newman said. “Just my mindset and the way my mind works with being the competitive driver that I am, I still felt beat. That’s just my mentality. You can fault me for it if you want but that’s my competitive drive. Now I still feel like I’m part of a championship team but I still know that we got beat and we need to be able to fix those things that beat us.”

Fixing what caused Newman to struggle in the Chase has much to do with fixing the mindset and morale of the No. 39 team, which both the driver and crew chief Tony Gibson admit suffered following a couple missteps at the start of the Chase.

After vying for victory in the Chase opener at Chicagoland only to run out of gas on the final lap, then winning the pole and running strong the next week at New Hampshire before a late tire failure, the No. 39 team imploded.

“I take full responsibility for it,” said Gibson. “I should have saddled up. I tried to keep my guys pumped up but they got beat down a couple races there and that was kind of hard to take. I failed as a leader to keep those guys pushing in the right direction. So I’ve got to get better at that. We’ve got all the tools to win with. We can contend for a championship; we know that. Obviously, our company has everything it needs. I’ve just got to step up as a leader and not make bad decisions.”

Ironically, all of Stewart’s Chase success — five wins, eight top-10s — came after telling crew chief Darian Grubb that he wouldn’t return to Stewart-Haas Racing in 2012. Newman and Gibson operated under no such cloud, but didn’t deliver similar results.

Ryan Newman (Left) and teammate Tony Stewart (Right) both sputtered at Texas. (Photo: Getty Images)

“We definitely failed from a team standpoint in those 10 races,” Newman said. “Our chemistry dissolved. We have to control that better. That’s one of the things we have to fix for 2012, hands down. I feel like we’ve had some opportunities that got away from us. I won’t say we’ve given races away but we should have been in victory lane more often than we have been, and those are the things we need to fix, as well.

"When you can’t fix those things and you know that you should and you’re capable, that makes it really tough to swallow.”

Prior to the Chase, Newman had enjoyed a solid regular season that actually featured more highlights than Stewart’s. While Stewart failed to score in the first 26 races and had to fight just to qualify for the playoffs, Newman won the summer New Hampshire race and comfortably made the 12-driver field.

Yet when it counted, Stewart’s team soared and Newman’s sputtered.

“We just got off. I guess some of our struggles in a roundabout way we’re due to his success,” Newman said of Stewart. “We struggled a little bit when we could have succeeded but then when they succeeded, it was weight that we put on our own shoulders.”

Newman hopes that weight won’t carry over to the 2012 season. Despite their 2011 Chase woes, Newman and Gibson have traditionally been a stout combination.

Having been paired upon the formation of Stewart-Haas in 2009, the two have made the Chase twice in three years together. Newman has won just twice over that time, however, and finished no better than ninth in points.

With SHR now a Sprint Cup champion organization, if stands to reason that Newman and Gibson might be under a bigger microscope in the upcoming season than ever before.

Will they wilt under the pressure, as happened in the last 10 races of 2011, or hunt a championship as their teammates did?

“Obviously we want to win one, too,” Gibson said. “But there’s some things you can’t force to happen, and that’s one of them you can’t force. That’s when you make mistakes like we made as a 39 team. So we’re going to try to learn from our mistakes. We’ve got to saddle up, we’ve got to figure out how to flip that switch and be better in the final 10.”

Jared Turner is an Associate Editor for SPEED.com, covering NASCAR and Formula One, and is an Editor for TruckSeries.com. His professional motorsports writing career began in 2005.