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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Stewart Makes Chicken Salad
Tony Stewart held onto fourth in the Sprint Cup standings...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted October 12, 2009   Fontana, CA
Tony Stewart fought back from a lap down and 30th place to finish fifth at California Sunday. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Two-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart rarely minces words, so it’s no surprise he was blunt in assessing his fifth-place finish in Sunday’s Pepsi 500 at Auto Club Speedway.

“It was making chicken salad out of chicken-you-know-what,” said Stewart. “We were pretty fortunate to get a couple of breaks there when we needed them. We just had to fight for the track position there at the end.”

The chicken-you-know-what Stewart spoke of occurred on Lap 163 of the 250-lap event, when the co-owner/driver of the No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet Impala SS got busted for speeding while exiting pit road. Stewart had to serve a drive-thru penalty, which dropped him to 30th, one lap behind the leaders.

And had Stewart finished the race 30th, his hopes of a third championship this season almost certainly would have gone up in smoke.

Instead, Stewart fought back.

On lap 186, a yellow flag flew for debris, and while the leaders pitted one lap later for four tires and fuel, Stewart opted to stay out in order to receive the “wave around.” That meant he and several other cars would be allowed to around the pace car prior to the restart to get back on the lead lap. But it also meant he was on old tires and out of sequence with the leaders.

Fortunately for Stewart, he got a break when Denny Hamlin spun on the Lap-190 restart, bringing out another caution. During that yellow, Stewart pitted for four tires and fuel. From there, he was able to scratch and claw his way to an excellent fifth-place finish, his third consecutive top 10 in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

Stewart now trails new leader Jimmie Johnson by 84 points with six races to go on the season. And realistically, he may be the guy deepest in the field who still has a shot of knocking off Johnson.

“We have a lot of racing left,” Stewart said after the race. “I am really proud of Darian Grubb (crew chief) and all the guys on this Office Depot/Old Spice team. We weren't quite as good as we wanted to be today. It shows there is no quit in this team at all. We just keep digging. We got our car good at the end of the day. We just lost so much track position and we had to fight to get it back. A lot of guys that had solid days toward the end got their cars hurt so we will take a top five.”

And in truth, championships often are determined by how teams respond to bad days and misfortune and less so by when they are piloting a rocket ship, as Stewart was last week when he won in Kansas.

Which explains why Stewart was delighted to end the Southern California race having made chicken salad.

“We never got to the top five there until the end,” said Stewart. “I am really proud of our guys. Our car got better and better. In the run that we had the speeding penalty and had to come in and got a lap down, we were running laps the same as the leader there but were a lap down with it. We got the car better at the end we just never got a chance to do anything until there in the end.”

That’s the kind of fighting that goes a long way this time of year.

“I don't care what it takes,” said Stewart. “I don't care if we have to go 12 laps down and have the right side knocked off of it if it gets us a top five at the end of the day, that is what we have to do the rest of the season.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED, and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to



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