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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Stewart Looking To Stay Hot
'Smoke' has seven top 10s in his last nine NASCAR Sprint Cup races...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted July 28, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Tony Stewart is anticipating another great run at Pocono Raceway. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Tony Stewart had a great run the last time the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series came to Pocono Raceway, and he aims to keep his hot streak going this weekend in the Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500.

Stewart, the two-time Sprint Cup champion and driver/co-owner of Stewart-Haas Racing, finished third behind the Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas of Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch in the June Pocono race. And since then, “Smoke” has stayed hot, as he tends to do in the summer. In the past seven races, Stewart has four top fives and six top 10s, moving from 16th in points to ninth.

As a result, Stewart is in good position to qualify for the Chase for the Sprint Cup and attempt to win his third title — Stewart was the last man not named Johnson to win a Cup championship, way back in 2005. Right now, though, he’d like to score his first race victory of the season on the three-turn, 2.5-mile Pocono triangle.

Stewart said a number of factors have figured into his team’s turnaround since a disappointing start when he had just one top-five finish in the first 13 races of the season.

Stewart is in good position to qualify for the Sprint Cup Chase and attempt his third title. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
“I think it’s just the work everybody has been doing,” said Stewart. “You know, it’s kind of weird how last year we started off the season really well, literally the first half of the year was right on pace with what we were looking for. Then four or five weeks before the Chase started, we started falling off and then really we were struggling during the Chase. It was kind of frustrating from that standpoint and we couldn’t really put our finger on what we were doing differently and what we were doing wrong that was causing us to not have that kind of performance.”

Things are quite a bit different so far this season.

“It seems like this year we got a slow start and it seems like now we’re picking it up, so hopefully we’re having the polar opposite of what we had last year,” said Stewart. “We’re going to start slow and finish strong this year. I just think it’s due to everybody’s work at the shop. There is one thing about our guys – they just don’t quit. They don’t give up.”

When Stewart left JGR at the end of 2008 and moved to SHR, he assembled a team around him with many people who had campaigned their own cars at one point or another, and understood the struggle and sacrifice that came with the job.

“They’re all racers. We’ve got a lot of guys that have come from sprint car racing or modified racing or running pavement late models across the country,” said Stewart. “It’s neat to have a shop full of what I call true racers – people that race because they love racing and we’re all lucky that we get paid to do it. That’s just the mentality of good racers. If things get tough, they don’t give up. They sit there and sort it out and try to figure out what it is they have to do to make it better, and that’s what our guys have done. They keep digging in and keep trying, and I think the results the last couple of weeks have shown that.”

Stewart’s former Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Kyle Busch said he struggles with Turn 1, with its 210 miles per hour entry speeds, but Stewart said that’s the turn he’s most comfortable with.

“Turn 1 is probably the easiest of the three,” said Stewart. “You drive it in kind of deep and then try to float the car through the corner. You go down the backstretch and into the tunnel turn and it’s basically one lane. It’s flat and very line-sensitive. You’ve got to make sure you’re right on your marks every lap when you go through there.”

It gets worse.

“Then you’ve got a short chute into Turn 3,” said Stewart. “It’s a big, long corner and it, too, is very line-sensitive. Add the fact that we’ve got a straightaway that’s three-quarters of a mile long after that, and it’s very important that you get through the last corner well. You need to come off the corner quickly so that you’re not bogged down when you start down that long straightaway. Each corner has its challenges, and each one tends to present a different set of circumstances with each lap you make.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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