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“It’s honestly just good people,” Stewart said. “That’ the biggest factor to our success. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the entertainment industry with TV or what company you have if you’re liked. It’s about being surrounded by good people and having the right people in the right position to do the right things.

“When you do that and you feel like you’ve got that in place that gives you the peace of mind that you’re not stressed out at the end of the day. I’m happy. I’m proud and feel like we’ve got a group of good people. I feel like we’ve got those key people in the right places and with that instead of being nervous at the end of the day I’m proud at the end of the day and that lets me be able to shut everything down at the end of the day and do what I want to do.”

Another reason why Stewart has been able to find success in his first season is the smaller size of his team. With his technical alliance with Hendrick Motorsports, which supplies Stewart-Haas with engines and chassis, Stewart has been able to get top-flight equipment without having to spend millions and millions in research and development.

So while what Stewart has been able to accomplish this year is far from easy, it could be considered a little easier than what, say, Hendrick Motorsports has done over the last 25 years.

“Yeah, I think there is in our situation because we’re not trying to build our own chassis, we’re not trying to build our own engines,” Stewart said. “Just physically the amount of people that we have is much, much less. It’s fractional compared to what it was at [Joe] Gibbs [Racing] or what it is at Hendrick’s.

“If you have a problem a lot of times it ends of being a smaller problem than it is in a bigger company. By the time you figure out you’ve got a problem it’s a lot larger than it would have been with a smaller group of people. So it’s easier to kind of get these guys one on one off to the side and make sure that everybody is on the same page before you get yourself in any type of drama like that.”

So far, Stewart has avoided that kind of drama. And the headaches that come along with it.

SceneDaily.com • Jimmie Johnson touts Tony Stewart as early Chase favorite