Team Preview: Stewart-Haas Racing
RacingOne.Com
The bar was set pretty high for Tony Stewart Racing in its first year of operation.
Both team owner/driver Stewart and Ryan Newman made their way into the Chase and proved themselves to be contenders nearly from the drop of the opening green flag.
With that performance in the rear view mirror the team now sets its sights on improving even further in year two and Stewart believes his organization is ready for the challenge.
"I'm proud of what we accomplished here in our first year for sure," Stewart said. "But you can't sit idle and reflect back on your accomplishments too long in this sport so really we started working on getting better for the 2010 season as soon as if not before last ended."
Newman feels that a lot was learned between he and Stewart last year that will be beneficial for the team to improve upon this season.
"We learned last year what we are capable of when we were performing to our ability with a lot of top-fives in a row and that’s tough to do in this sport so I look forward to 2010 because of the things we experienced in 2009 and created as a team and as an organization," he said. "Obviously we have notes to fall back on where we had no notes before, it’s gonna be nice and a little bit of an insurance call coming to the racetrack. We had a lot of times last year where we got rained out in practice or qualifying and we didn’t know. This year I think we’ll have a lot better information to work from and teammates and willingness to work together all together."
In addition to working to find advantages to keep his team on the upswing, Stewart now has some other changes within the sport to deal with like the switch of the Sprint Cup car's rear wing to a spoiler, the return of bump drafting at Talladega and a more hands off policy by NASCAR.
But the two-time series champ knows that change within any sport is inevitable but that in NASCAR it's manageable.
"There's a lot that's changed in the 11 years that I've ran in the Cup Series," Stewart said. "You know, it's a sport that's always gonna be changing. That's what we mentioned when we were in Charlotte. Basketball courts, they don't change the dimensions of them, they don't keep moving the height of the hoop up or down. Our sport is always in a constant state of change. I think that's what kind of gives us an advantage to a certain degree over other pro sports."
With a year under his belt and an organization that came together rather quickly in its first year of existence, Stewart has been counting down the days until the start of the new season and Daytona.
"The good thing is I feel like we have a shot at winning the championship this year," Stewart said. "We lead the points for 13 weeks. We missed a little bit when it counted the most. But, you know, we weren't the only ones. We still finished in the upper half of the Chase guys. You know, for a first year team, I didn't think that was too bad. If we can do that the first year, I don't know why we shouldn't set our goals higher this year, set our goals where they should be every year when you start the season."