| | | | | | NOT SWEATING IT | Drought not bothering Stewart | |
| | By SceneDaily Staff As competitive a driver as Tony Stewart is, you might think he'd be bothered by not winning at Talladega Superspeedway in 18 career NASCAR Cup series starts -- especially after posting six runner-up finishes at the 2.66-mile track.
Sure, he'd like to win, but not going to victory lane doesn't bother him, he says.
"No, not at all," said Stewart, a two-time Cup champion. "I mean, Talladega is a track where you can't do anything on your own. You have to strictly rely on what everybody else around you is doing. It's still not real racing when somebody else has to go with you and somebody else can dictate how you run. If you don't ever have anybody go with you all day, you never have a shot at winning. But if you have guys go with you, you have a shot.
"We haven't won there, but look at how many second-place finishes we've had. Anytime you can finish in the top two is like a win at Talladega, especially when you've done it as consistently as we have. As volatile as Talladega can be with getting caught in a wreck and this or that, for us to have finished second there six times, that's something to be pretty proud of because Talladega is not a race track where you can do it all on your own.
"You've got to have help. Our finishing average is pretty high - higher than most for the amount of races we've run there. So I'm pretty satisfied with the way we've run there."
Stewart's average finish at Talladega is 12.6, and that includes three finishes of 28th or worse when he was eliminated by crashes. Otherwise, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver has eight top-five and 11 top-10 finishes.
Stewart was second at both Talladega races in 2001 and 2005. And the 2005 races started a streak of three consecutive runnerup finishes. He's led 183 laps in his career there and was 28th and eighth last year.
But despite his success, Stewart doesn't consider himself a drafting expert.
"You hope that with 10 years of experience, you'd at least learn enough to keep yourself competitive," Stewart said. "I don't think we're a master of the draft, but I do feel like we've learned enough about it. I think our record speaks for itself for how many laps we've led and where we've been. We obviously know how to get ourselves in position to win. It's just sometimes finishing the race off has been the hard part."
That's been the hard part this year, too. Stewart has three top-five and five top-10s in eight races but has yet to visit victory lane.
"This business is strictly a week-to-week business," Stewart said. "What you did last week may or may not work this week. The main reason for that is technology. Every week people are working to get their programs better than what they were the week before. If some organization hits on something, you could be a top-five car, and all of a sudden struggle to be a top-10 car.
"That being said, I'm fairly happy with where we're at. We just don't have anything to show for it, and that's what is so frustrating. There's a lot of racing left. We want to win everywhere we go, and our team is working hard to do just that."
| | Posted April 23, 2008 , 6:15 pm EST
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