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There's a lot of folks in the NASCAR world that said Tony Stewart was straight crazy to leave his championship-winning team of Joe Gibbs Racing for the 2009 season.Me? I didn't exactly make a prediction to stay on the safe side, mainly because I know how Stewart always produces when the odds are against him.
But for all of those that said Stewart and hired teammate Ryan Newman wouldn't find success, the still-young Stewart-Haas Racing is proving the doubters to be completely wrong.
Such a fact, of course, isn't just based on the team's marvelous performance Saturday night at Richmond International Raceway, but on the results that SHR has turned in through the season's first ten races.
That isn't to say, though, that the SHR success in the Russ Friedman 400 should be overlooked.
Team patriarch Stewart led the SHR onslaught by taking a distant second-place behind an untouchable Kyle Busch, with Newman allowing just Jeff Burton between him and Stewart to take fourth spot. Stewart's No. 14 didn't ever nose up front to lead a lap, but some crafty pit work put Newman in front of the 43-car field for some 45 laps of the 400 lap event.
After the race, though, Stewart was pleased with his finish, but felt like circumstances late in the race contributed to his runner-up spot.
"I think we backed into this one today," said Stewart. "We got lucky and got a chance to get tires there with about 50 to go and then got that green flag run at the end, which we typically don't get. So that helped us. We had a lot less laps on the tires than those guys."
Luck or not, it was still a good run and showed a team is developing past just having fast race cars.
Newman, on the other hand, thought he might have seen one slip away.
"We had a winning race car and I think the guy typically out in front had a winning car but the bottom line was we didn't get out in front when we needed to. We had the leader strategy when we got caught up in that restart behind the No. 5 car," said Newman. "I told the guys if we keep doing this we'll get what we want and obviously we want to be in victory lane."
Newman has now scored two straight top-fives -- a first for the South Bend, Ind., driver since the end of the 2007 season at Penske Racing.
"I can't wait to get to the shop Monday and see the smiles on their faces. They have been working hard," said Stewart. "It is just coming together, one piece at a time."
Indeed the season is coming together for SHR -- something that's quite an improvement over the lows the team had hit just before the season-opening Daytona 500 when both primary cars were wiped out in a crash during final practice.
What's worse for the rest of NASCAR? Tony Stewart's forte in this business has nearly always been the mid-season stretch of races at slick race tracks in the heat.
In fact, 15 of Stewart's 33 career wins have come at the next ten tracks on the Sprint Cup schedule, with just one -- the site next weekend's 500-mile jaunt around the famed Darlington Raceway -- being a track where Stewart is yet to visit victory lane.
At the clip this team is advancing, it wouldn't be a surprise for Stewart to erase that zero from his résumé.
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