The Chase - Steward Charlotte Preview

KANNAPOLIS, Oct. 12, 2011: That “curriculum” stems from the Latin word for “race course” is appropriate considering that the core curriculum of the 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup is 1.5-mile ovals.

Intermediate tracks are the bread-and-butter of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, and nowhere is this more evident than in the Chase, where half of the venues are 1.5-mile ovals.

Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Ill., kicked off the Chase, and its 1.5-mile D-shaped layout is a near clone of Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, which the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series visited last Sunday. Charlotte (N.C.) Motor Speedway is next up on the docket, as Saturday night’s Bank of America 500 serves as the halfway mark in the Chase and in the slate of intermediate tracks. Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, which features a similar layout to Charlotte, comes in November, and the season finale follows two weeks later at the 1.5-mile Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Tony Stewart, driver of the No. 14 Mobil 1/Office Depot Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing, earned a GPA boost by winning the Chase opener at Chicagoland and then following it with another victory the next weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon.

The back-to-back wins put Stewart atop the point standings, but his time there was short lived. A 25th-place finish in round No. 3 of the Chase at Dover (Del.) International Speedway dropped him to third, nine points out of first. A rebound seemed eminent at Kansas, where Stewart ran second to race-winner Jimmie Johnson for much of the day, only to have his effort undone by a late-race pit miscue that left him 15th.

After becoming only the second driver in Chase history to open the championship charge with back-to-back wins, Stewart comes into round No. 5 at Charlotte seventh in points, 19 markers out of the top spot. The GPA boosters Stewart earned via his wins at Chicagoland and New Hampshire have him still eligible to take class honors, but to deliver the commencement address at the awards banquet in Las Vegas, Stewart must take the strength shown at track doppelgangers Chicagoland and Kansas and deliver another strong run at Charlotte in the Bank of America 500.

Can it be done, especially as five-time and reigning Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson has rallied from eighth in the standings, 16 points back after round No. 1 at Chicagoland, to third in points, only four points away from the lead? Consider that Stewart was winless after the 26-race regular season, but come Chase time, rattled off two straight wins to go from ninth in the standings to first.

With wild point swings seemingly happening after each Chase race, another positive point swing can certainly happen at Charlotte. And with Charlotte being the third 1.5-mile oval the series visits in this year’s Chase, Stewart is banking on a Bank of America 500 performance that will emulate the kind of run he had there in October 2003 when he scored a dominant win by leading six times for a race-high 169 laps.

TONY STEWART, Driver of the No. 14 Mobil 1/Office Depot Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing:

A lot of your fellow drivers have said that this slate of races at the intermediate tracks will set the tone for the remainder of the Chase. Do you agree with that?

“I think so. I mean, there are more mile-and-a-half tracks in the Chase than there is anything else. It’s definitely a situation where these couple of weeks will give everybody an idea of where they are and what they have to do.”

You’re seventh in points, 19 points behind Chase leader Carl Edwards. Can you still win this championship and collect your third career Sprint Cup title?

“My standpoint has always been, until they say that you’re mathematically out of it, you always have a shot. We won the USAC Silver Crown Series championship in ’95, and we were the third driver of three that had a shot, mathematically, to win it. There were two drivers, Jack Hewitt and Dave Darland, that were neck-and-neck in the point standings, and we were kind of the third wheel. We were only included in the group media sessions because we were mathematically in the hunt. Both of those drivers ended up having problems in the race, and we won the championship by two points. You realize when you use that experience, knowing that as long as you’re mathematically in the hunt, you still have a shot. If we have a chance to win the championship at the end, trust me, we’re all for that and we would love nothing more than that. But I think right now where we’re at and how many points we need to make up, I think it lets us have a go-for-broke attitude and just go out and try to do what we did at Chicagoland and New Hampshire and win races. I’ve always said, if you win races, the points will take care of itself. We could still, by theory, win the next six races in a row and still not win the point championship. For us, it’s about going out and doing what we can do, and the other 11 drivers are going to dictate their fates, too.”

Is there a time when a driver who has had some poor runs needs to go into catch-up mode?

“Yeah, the season finale at Homestead. You can ask me that question after we run Saturday night and the answer may be totally different. It’s strictly a week-to-week deal. None of us can predict this. If we could, we’d be bookies in Las Vegas making millions of dollars betting on these races instead of driving in them. And it’s a heck of a lot safer sitting in a chair in that dark room letting cocktail waitresses bring you drinks. I don’t have the answers. Nobody has the answers. All we can do is speculate on what’s going to happen until each week actually happens. So, all we can do is guess on what’s going to happen. If any of us can predict the top-10 positions in Saturday night’s race – you’re a genius, let alone figuring out how the next six weeks are going to be.”

How do you compete against 11 guys for a championship while still competing with 42 guys for a race win?

“For the 12 that are competing, we’re still racing against 31 other guys just like we’ve been since the beginning of the year. For the first two or three weeks, I don’t think we’ve been too conscious of where we are on the racetrack. It’s still business as usual. But as we get closer to the end of the season – probably with two or three races to go – you’re going to be singling out guys a little bit more and paying closer attention to where they are on the racetrack, what position they’re in, and how many laps they’ve led. The further we get into it, the more the points are going to separate the field, and you’re going to see exactly who you’re racing against for the championship. There probably won’t be 12 guys with two or three races left. It’ll be down to four or five guys who have a shot at it.”

What does it take to be successful at Charlotte?

“It always seems like it’s a battle of trying to get your car to cut through the center of the corner and keep the forward drive in it. It seems like it’s a sacrifice of one or the other, but the two ends of the track are different. It seems like you can carry a lot more speed through (turns) one and two, and (turns) three and four are a little more thread-the-needle-type corners. Sometimes there isn’t a big difference between the fall and spring races at Charlotte. They’re spread out so far and they’re at the beginning of summer and the end of summer, so a lot of times they can be very similar.”