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NASCAR

Tony Stewart happy with first outing as new team

By SceneDaily.com

Feb 10, 2009

Stewart-Haas Racing's Tony Stewart was pleased with his outing in Saturday night's Budweiser Shootout, though he readily admitted it wasn't the "prettiest third place" he'd ever gotten in a race.

In his first outing in the No. 14, with Darian Grubb as his crew chief and with the organization Stewart co-owns, Stewart found satisfaction in the performance - and in the general atmosphere surrounding the season-opening NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Daytona International Speedway. It didn't really matter that this race offered no points, not to the competitors.

"Fans were pumped up about the Shootout tonight," Stewart said. "It just kind of made me smile, made me laugh, made me forget that I was going to get ready to get in my own race car for the first time."

Once in it, though, things went pretty well for Stewart. He missed the race's final crashes and finished behind Richard Childress Racing's Kevin Harvick and Roush Fenway Racing's Jamie McMurray. He admits that he might have finished better than he ran, but was satisfied with the way his new team worked together throughout the race.

"We ended up finishing third, but we weren't the third-place car," he said. "We had, I think, probably one of the top-five best handling cars out there. We got some things we need to work on. It's given us a direction on what we need to concentrate on this week before the qualifying race. Obviously, if we haven't figured it out by then, we got two more days to work on it."

As he watched his crew work together, as he continued to bond with his new group, Stewart didn't find himself at a loss at all.

After 10 seasons with Joe Gibbs Racing, one might assume Stewart would endure a bit of a challenge in making the transition to the new car. In the end, though, as he competed in a fast car and ran among the leaders all night, he found that he didn't really feel any different than he had in the past.

All he felt, it seems, was a sense of pride in what his group had accomplished - and renewed confidence in what they can accomplish.

"I'm really proud of Darian," Stewart said. "I'm proud of the guys. They had really good stops tonight. As odd as it's going to sound, it almost seemed like we worked together before. I was really surprised in the confidence I heard from him every time the caution came out about what we were going to do, how much of a change we were going to make. He really impressed me tonight.

"You never know what's gonna happen that first night with a new guy. It really put me at ease I guess the whole night. Just hearing his confidence on the radio gave me confidence."

Still, some things felt a little different.

After spending the offseason as a team owner for the first time, after working to build the organization and get this effort on track, Stewart admits that he did feel the impact of that when he led the first of his four laps at the front.

"It's a proud moment when you realize that you've seen everything happen firsthand at the shop and seen it build and develop over the winter, to see how it got here," Stewart said. "It's not just disappear for the winter and go off and mess around on vacation or whatever, then show up at the track and all of a sudden you go to work again. It's been a little more detailed than that for me this winter. I guess it hit a little harder when we led those first laps."