CUP: Stewart Pleased With First Season

Sprint Cup

CUP: Stewart Pleased With First Season

In 2009, Tony Stewart accomplished something that hadn’t been done since Alan Kulwiciki’s magical season of 1992...

Tom Jensen | Posted December 02, 2009 Las Vegas, NV

Tony Stewart (Left) hired fellow Hoosier Ryan Newman (Right) to complete the driver roster at Stewart-Haas Racing. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Tony Stewart and the late Alan Kulwicki couldn’t have been more differently temperamentally, but in 2009 Stewart accomplished something that hadn’t been done since Kulwiciki’s magical season of 1992: Field a truly championship-level Sprint Cup team as an owner/driver.

Amid much skepticism, Stewart took over as co-owner of the formerly back-of-the-pack Haas CNC Racing team prior to the start of the 2009 season. Renaming the team Stewart-Haas Racing, the two-time Sprint Cup champ made a series of heavyweight hires, most notably luring away competition director Bobby Hutchens from Richard Childress Racing and crew chiefs Darian Grubb and Tony Gibson from Hendrick Motorsports and Dale Earnhardt Inc., respectively.

And with his fellow Hoosier Ryan Newman installed in the seat of SHR’s No. 39 Chevrolet Impala SS, Stewart and his minions went to work. Did they ever.

By the time the season ended, both Stewart and Newman made the Chase for the Sprint Cup, finishing sixth and ninth, respectively, in points.

Stewart won the annual Sprint All-Star Race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in May, and collectively Stewart and Newman went on to score victories in four points races, as well as two poles, 20 top-five, and 38 top-10 finishes. As a team, SHR led 628 laps, with the two team drivers tying for most laps run on the season at 10,468 — completed (99.8 percent), missing only 24 laps each all season long.

And when Stewart won at Pocono in June, he became the first owner/driver to lead the Cup points standings since Kulwicki in the final race of 1992, a span of 556 races. He would hold the lead through the end of NASCAR’s 26-race regular season.

Stewart’s win also broke another longstanding mark — it had been 375 races since the last driver/owner won a Sprint Cup race — Ricky Rudd on Sept. 27, 1998 at Martinsville Speedway.

Frankly, it was a season that exceeded all expectations, both for Stewart and Newman as drivers and the team as a whole.

“I’m like a proud father,” said Stewart, who co-owns SHR with Oxnard, Calif.-based Haas Automation, the largest CNC machine tool builder in the western world. “Gene Haas (CEO, Haas Automation) is the one that started all this and he’s the one that’s given us all the tools and opportunities to do what we’re doing. It’s nice to be able to show him the results of what he’s built. I’ve been able to come in and kind of tie the loose ends together for him. It’s been neat to see over the last 13 months how this has all come together and progressed through the season.

“I feel like for a first-year team, I have to give us an ‘A’. If we could’ve won the championship, you would give yourself an ‘A+’, but for a first-year team an ‘A’ or an ‘A-’ is appropriate for what had to do to come together in such a short amount of time. There was a lot of change for everyone who came to Stewart-Haas, and to get all the people organized, get them working together, along with getting all of our equipment ready, I think we did fairly well, and from that standpoint, I don’t think I could be any happier.”

“Making the Chase was a dream come true,” added Newman, who qualified for NASCAR’s playoff round for the third time in his career after a three-year absence. “To think back to Daytona where we basically went through three racecars and to climb all the way back after 26 races to make the Chase — it says a lot about the hard work that everybody at Stewart-Haas Racing has put into this effort.

“We really didn’t know what to expect coming into this season. People asked about our expectations and our goals — and we had some goals – but we didn’t know what the expectations would be. And people said it looked like a risk to leave Penske Racing, but to me, Stewart-Haas Racing looked like an opportunity. Yeah, there was risk associated with it, but it was an opportunity.”

And now, the task hand is to go for the big prize in 2010 and dethrone Jimmie Johnson as NASCAR Sprint Cup champion.

“Obviously, we wanted to win the championship this year and after leading the point standings, we felt like we had a good shot,” said Stewart, the last man not named Johnson to win the title. “We just couldn’t get that run in the last 10 weeks that we wanted. But we’ll do whatever we can next year to try and pick up on that and improve on it.”

“We achieved a lot, but we’re not totally satisfied either, and that’s because we’re not sitting at the head table in Las Vegas this year,” said Newman.

But they will surely try to get there next 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
target="_new">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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