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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Stewart - Improvement Not Automatic
Tony Stewart is looking forward to some down time before gearing up for the 2010 season...
Bob Pockrass  | http://www.scenedaily.com  |  Posted December 10, 2009   Charlotte, NC
Driver Tony Stewart speaks during the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series awards banquet during Champions Week in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

It might make some sense to expect that a first-year team should be better in its second season, but Tony Stewart isn’t taking it as a given that he will finish better than sixth in points in 2010 just because his Sprint Cup organization is a year older and a year wiser.

The two-time Cup champion certainly hopes his Stewart-Haas Racing team finishes better, but he knows just how tough it is to race in the series. His team won four races this year and had the most points during the “regular season.” Teammate Ryan Newman also made the Chase For The Sprint Cup and placed ninth in the standings while a victory eluded him.

“You look at somebody like Kyle Busch that missed the Chase, you look at someone like Carl Edwards that went through the whole season without winning a race and finished 11th in points after the strong year that he had at the end of the season last year,” Stewart said. “It’s hard to say that you expect that to be better next year, especially when you’ve seen proof of other organizations that by theory were supposed to do better this year that actually ended up with less performance.”

One thing Stewart does know is that this offseason will be different than the last offseason when he was busy hiring people for the new organization as he prepared for his first year as the team’s co-owner. Last year, he was in the shop until mid-afternoon on Thanksgiving Day. This year, he was off beginning the Monday afternoon prior to Thanksgiving.

“It’s a lot more calming feeling after knowing what the product is now,” Stewart said. “At this time last year, we were getting ready to go into a season that was an unproven product. This year, we’ve got that first season under our belt, and we know what to expect. It’s a matter of trying to refine it and trying to figure out how to make it better.”

While he expects there will be some changes in personnel, just as there are in most organizations, Stewart said he believes his organization has laid the foundation to make things better.

“I honestly thought it was going to be a lot harder,” Stewart said. “I don’t want it to make it sound like it’s easy because it’s not. But I learned the same thing I learned from [team owner] Joe Gibbs, and that’s if you hire the right people in the right positions, then everything is fine. You’ve just got to hire those right people to do the right jobs. That’s been one of the biggest keys to our success.”

Looking back on 2009, Stewart points to the first race weekend as the one that set the tone for the season. Both Stewart and Newman totaled cars in the days leading up to the Daytona 500, but Stewart finished eighth in a backup.

“Losing both cars was a big hurdle to cross for an organization,” Stewart said. “Especially when you have a new group of guys that haven’t worked together. When you get in that crisis situation, it’s easy for people to get unraveled a little bit. … That was a situation that showed us all exactly what this group was going to be capable of.”


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Bob Pockrass

SceneDaily.com

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