This season, it also makes for another potential step back toward championship contention for Stewart, who as recently as two months ago seemed buried in points and with little hope of becoming one of the 12 drivers to challenge for the Sprint Cup title. Recent weeks, though, have seen a dramatic turnaround for the driver and owner at Stewart-Haas Racing, not exactly surprising given that the two-time series champion is typically at his best when the asphalt gets slippery and the temperatures tickle triple-digits.
We've seen this before -- both of Stewart's previous championship campaigns were fueled by strong summertime stretches, which the driver credits to the car control he learned while wheeling sprint and midget cars around greasy short tracks in the U.S. Auto Club ranks. While Stewart hasn't quite earned a place among the top title contenders this season, he's certainly placed himself on the periphery by knocking out top-10 finishes in five of his past seven starts, and climbing from 18th in points after the May 8 event at Darlington to ninth today.
Stewart actually had a streak of four consecutive top-10s snapped last weekend at Daytona, when his car suffered damage in one of the night's many accidents and wound up 24th. But because so many cars were taken out and so few drivers finished on the lead lap, he didn't lose any ground in the standings.
"You know, it is 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," he said. "It was kind of frustrating from that standpoint, and we couldn't really put our finger on what we were doing different and what we were doing wrong that was causing us to not have that kind of performance. It seems like this year, we got a slow start to the year, and it seems like we are picking it up, so hopefully we're having the polar opposite of what we had last year. We are going to start slow and finish strong this year."
That would be more typical of Stewart, whose most recent Cup championship in 2005 preceded Jimmie Johnson's unprecedented stretch of four straight titles. Last year, in his first campaign at the helm of Stewart-Haas, the driver of the No. 14 car defied all expectations by leading the points for 12 weeks before fading to an eventual sixth-place finish. The growing pains everyone predicted at last seemed to set in this year, particularly during a six-week span in the spring where Stewart went without a single-digit finish. Since then, the results have markedly improved.
"It's not just one thing. It's a lot of little things here and there. The engine department, they keep making gains. Our chassis are getting better," said Stewart, who gets engines and chassis from Hendrick Motorsports. "At our shop, our shock engineers, everybody has just really been digging deep. You don't have to find one big chunk to make a big gain like that. A lot of times it's very, very small details that each individual department will find that helps bring the whole performance of the team up."
There is still work to be done, of course. Two weeks ago at New Hampshire, Stewart matched his best finish of the season with a runner-up result, but he still hasn't won this year. The recent announced departure of sponsor Old Spice makes Stewart's ownership role more complicated, requiring him to find another company to fill the financing void on his car for the 2011 season. That makes the chance of him adding a third team for next year "probably zero percent," he said. On-track, though, things are clearly turning around.
"Every week we're just learning a little more about what to do to get the feel in the car that I like," he said. "It's been working out ... We weren't happy where we were at in the points. I'm still not really comfortable where we're at in the point standings right now, but we're definitely making gains, for sure."
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