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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Stewart Seeks Sin City Victory
Tony Stewart has never won a NASCAR race in Las Vegas...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted February 25, 2010   Las Vegas, NV
Tony Stewart has fond recollections of his Sprint Showdown win in 1999. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Contrary to popular belief, Tony Stewart has won a race in Las Vegas, where Sunday's Shelby American NASCAR Sprint Cup race will be contested.

Stewart, the 2002 and '05 Cup champion, swept the United States Auto Club Sprint/Midget doubleheader in November 2002 at the Las Vegas Bullring, located just behind Turns 1 and 2 of Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Now, Stewart wants to conquer the big track, one of the few places where he hasn't won at least one Cup or NASCAR Nationwide Series race.

Stewart had a decent run at Auto Club Speedway last weekend, when he posted a ninth-place finish. Coupled with a 22nd-place finish in the Daytona 500, Stewart is now 17th in points, not where he'd hoped to be in the season. But the year is still very young and Stewart, a notoriously slow starter, doesn't seem over concerned.

That said, like a lot of other Cup owners and drivers, he's anxious to find out exactly where he's at relative to the competition. He'll know soon enough.

“These early races teach you very quickly where your program is compared to the competition,” said Stewart, who co-owns Stewart-Haas Racing and drives the No. 14 SHR Chevrolet Impala SS. “If your cars are good, you’ll run well at California, Vegas, Atlanta, Texas and so on. Everybody wants to know where they stack up and shake up right now. If you can get off to a good start, it shows that your program is really where it needs to be. This is a huge week.”

After 10 years driving for Joe Gibbs Racing, last year Stewart moved into a unique partnership with Gene Haas to become half-owner of what used to be Haas CNC Racing.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Stewart said the transition from strictly driver to co-owner/driver hasn't been all that drastic.

“It hasn’t changed from the driving side,” he said. “I think I’ve been on the ownership side long enough not only with the Cup stuff, but with my open-wheel teams, that it’s just business as usual. When you get in the car, you’re just thinking about being a driver. You’re not thinking about making payroll at the end of the week or all the other things that you worry about when you’re outside the car. When you’re in the car, if you’re thinking about anything other than driving the car, then you probably shouldn’t be in there to begin with. For me, that’s something that’s been really easy to separate.”

Speaking of ownership, Stewart the entrepreneur will get a rare treat this week: He'll actually get to see the USAC and World of Outlaws teams he owns race on the dirt track adjacent to LVMS.

“It’s really a cool weekend because we get to watch the USAC guys on Thursday and then the Outlaws guys on Friday, so I get to see both sides of my open-wheel teams run two days in a row, and then I get to play the rest of the weekend,” said Stewart. “So I’m excited about that. That’s what makes going to Las Vegas and Charlotte (N.C.) so much fun is that we do get to see our other programs running. We’ll get to see all of our teams out there and that will be fun.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEEDtv.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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