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THE SEASON: Anyone contemplating the story of Tony Stewart's 2009 season before the fact might easily come away with the thought "career suicide after the two-time champion pulled up his roots at Joe Gibbs Racing to become a co-owner of an oft-struggling Sprint Cup Series team. Stewart, incredibly, decided to leave behind his legacy as a consistent winner at Gibbs Racing, where he won Sprint Cup championships in 2002 and 2005, when he made the official announcement at Chicagoland Speedway creating Stewart-Haas Racing.
But in typical Tony Stewart fashion, he proved every doubter wrong. Every single one.
In the first ten races of 2009, Stewart finished in the Top-10 seven times - a 150 percent improvement in the number of Top-10s earned by co-team owner Gene Haas in seven previous seasons of Cup competition. By the end of the season, Stewart had earned more Top-5s (15) than the number of Top-10s (14) Haas' previous teams had scored.
Moreover, Stewart actually performed better in 2009 than in his final stint with JGR in 2008. The first win, albeit not an official victory, came on one of NASCAR's biggest nights in the Sprint Cup All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Three weeks later, Stewart raced to victory on Pocono Raceway's tricky triangle for his first points win as a team owner/driver.
Three more 2009 wins came Talladega, Watkins Glen and Kansas.
Not exactly a career suicide, eh?
THE STATISTICS:
Best Finish - 1st, four times
Worst Finish - 35th, Talladega
Top-5s - 15
Top-10s - 23
Total Laps Led - 414
Percent of Laps Completed - 99.8
THE FUTURE: Plain and simple, Tony Stewart's name might be the next one etched into the Sprint Cup Series champion trophy come Homestead in November.
The team had a hall pass of sorts for 2009 and excelled more often and at more tracks than nearly every so-called expert blindly predicted (including yours truly). Obviously, the alliance with Hendrick Motorsports proved to be helpful in terms of a winning chassis, strong engines and set-up help. Then again, Stewart-Haas Racing wasn't the first team to have such a benefit.
Now that, the entire team has a year under its belt, expect a pay off of big dividends in 2010. And of course, they've got Tony Stewart as the driver. It won't be about wins in 2010 for SHR, it'll be about how close Stewart can come to winning his third title.
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