| | | | | | DON'T COUNT YOUR EGGS... | Stewart cautions of being overconfidence in season | |
| | By Scenedaily.com MARTINSVILLE, Va. – In a sport that lasts for the better part of 10 months, Tony Stewart says it’s unwise for any team, regardless of how well they may be running, to get too confident.
“We ran good [at Bristol] and this week it could be a total flop,” Stewart said Friday at Martinsville Speedway.
“This sport is a week-to-week sport. We could have won the last five races in a row and we could come out this Sunday and be terrible and finish five laps down, and be working hard to do that."
“You don’t ever get too confident. You never feel like you are exactly where you want to be and you’re always striving to be better. Even when you are on a high when everything is going good, you  | | CIA Stock Photo | “This sport is a week-to-week sport. We could have won the last five races in a row and we could come out this Sunday and be terrible and finish five laps down, and be working hard to do that." |
are still always trying to be better than where you are at. I guess that’s why I never sit and think about it.”
Stewart’s not had to worry about being overconfident – he’s riding an 18-race winless streak that dates back to August of 2007. But his Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 team has been competitive out of the box this season, despite an offseason change from Chevrolet to Toyota.
Stewart, 36, enters Sunday’s Goody’s Cool Orange 500 seventh in points and just 126 behind teammate and points leader Kyle Busch. While much of the talk heading into this weekend’s event – the sixth stop for NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series – has surrounded Hendrick Motorsports’ domination at the tiny 0.526-mile track, Stewart knows the way to the winners circle here as well.
His win in the fall race of 2000 was his first Cup win from the pole; in the spring race of 2006, he led more than half the laps (288 of 500) en route to the win.
“We just take it a week at a time,” Stewart, a winner of 32 Cup races, said. “I can’t say that we’ve sat down and said ‘OK, as a whole this is where we are at.’ We take one week at a time and go to the next week. ... After the race is over you analyze the weekend and you go on to the next week. I don’t sit there and dwell on it and sit there and try to look at six straight weeks and say ‘This is what we did for six straight weeks.’ They are all different weeks.”
After back-to-back top-10s to open the season – at Daytona and California – Stewart finished 43rd at Las Vegas after smacking the wall in Turn 4. He rebounded from that setback with a season’s best runnerup finish at Atlanta the following week. A week later, at Bristol, he led 267 laps and was battling with teammate Denny Hamlin and Richard Childress Racing’s Kevin Harvick when contact with Harvick put him in the wall with two laps remaining.
“You never got comfortable with where you are at,” Stewart, winner of Cup titles in 2002 and 2005, said, “because you knew that the next week it could be over and you could be struggling. You have got to strive every week to just be better than what you were the week before.”
| | Posted March 30, 2008 , 9:20 pm EST
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