Newman a new man in 2009
Flyin’ Ryan Newman is flying again.
He hasn’t won a race this year, but you can smell it coming. After three seasons of racing mostly in the shadows at Penske Racing, Newman has new life at the new Stewart-Haas Racing team. He has two top-fives and four top-10s in 10 races and is a solid 10th in seasonal points.
And he’s done all this despite the fact that his teammate, Tony Stewart, is the more prominent partner in the new team and despite the fact that a 3,400-pound race car almost landed in his lap recently.
Newman’s season has had a remarkable and unusual trajectory. For the first six races of the year, he posted a higher finish with each succeeding week – 36th at Daytona, 28th at Fontana, 25th at Las Vegas, 22nd at Atlanta, seventh at Bristol and sixth at Martinsville.
That spin ended with a 15th-place run at Texas, but Newman has had a third and a fourth in the past two races and has climbed from deep in the points to a position to make the Chase For The Sprint Cup.
Newman missed the Chase in the past three seasons, including last year, when he won the Daytona 500 to open with a splash but soon disappeared underwater. Soon, it was easy to forget that this was the same guy who won eight races in 2003.
At Stewart-Haas, Newman appears to have rekindled the promise he showed a few years ago.
