Tony Stewart, crew chief make right call to end slump, climb back into championship contention
The numbers on the race monitor told the story. Every time the lap number changed, so did Tony Stewart’s lead margin over second-place Jeff Gordon. With nine laps left in the Price Chopper 400 at Kansas Speedway, Stewart led by .702 of a second. A lap later, the lead was .701. Then .698 and then .537.
The difference was tires. On the final round of pit stops a few minutes earlier, Stewart’s team had changed only two tires to move him into first place – and into the precious “clean air” the lead carries with it at tracks such as this. Gordon chose four tires for speed but took the final green flag in sixth place.
From that point – the last green period began with 26 laps remaining – it was a matter of calculus. Could Stewart’s car, with the considerable advantage of being out front but with two older tires, hold on through the end of the race while the cars of Gordon and others in the lead pack with four new tires enjoyed better grip?
The answer, as Stewart crew chief Darian Grubb had estimated, was a solid yes. And, over the final five laps, the tide turned and Stewart padded his margin over Gordon.
As Greg Biffle, the race’s presumptive winner until the late-race caution flag bunched the field, later put it, “These cars like clean air.”
Stewart won the race by .89 second, as Gordon’s charge on better rubber was blunted over the closing five laps.
Biffle perhaps took the day’s biggest emotional hit. Although he led a race-high 113 laps as his team rebuilt its confidence with one of its best overall runs of the year, he gave up the lead on the final round of pit stops to get four tires – and lived to regret it. That dropped him into the dreaded dirty air of the pack, and he finished third.
For Stewart, the win was about much more than the winner’s check and a fourth victory this season. The driver known as “Smoke” regained his footing in the race for the championship after a sour six-race stretch in which, after scoring 10 straight top-10 finishes this summer, he had managed a best finish of only ninth.
“This helps to pick us back up,” Grubb said. “We’ve had a few bad weeks. We haven’t had the performance we wanted and the finishes we wanted in the first two races.”
The win boosted Stewart from fifth to fourth in points and, perhaps more important, trimmed his deficit to points leader Mark Martin from 106 to 67.
The Kansas finish added luster to the Chase competition with seven races remaining. Five drivers are within 99 points of Martin, who finished seventh. It’s essentially a wide-open race, although Martin and second-place Jimmie Johnson (who’s 18 back after finishing ninth) still carry the roles of favorites.
Stewart firmly re-established his presence in the challenging pack with a splendid team showing at Kansas as he and Grubb showcased the sort of driver-crew chief trust and confidence that can be critical in close races down the stretch.
Grubb settled on the two-tire decision quickly. Stewart accepted it even more quickly, and off they went.
“You don’t question him when he makes a call,” Stewart said of Grubb. “You know it’s the right thing to do, and you go from there.”
Stewart had the same sort of relationship with Greg Zipadelli, his crew chief for a decade at Joe Gibbs Racing. For some driver-mechanic combinations, it’s one that develops over a period of years. Stewart and Grubb, in their first season together, seem to have made it work quickly.
“Honestly, when we started this thing in the spring,” Stewart said of Grubb, “there were times when I was sitting in the car, and I told him what my balance was, and he told me what we were going to change, and I was like, ‘Wow, is that the right way to go?’ I told him that, too.
“It’s just learning each other. It’s learning a new package. It was a big learning curve for me to learn a new chassis. Darian obviously knows what these cars like and what this chassis package likes. It’s just a matter of tailoring it to what I like feel-wise in the car.
“There were times the first couple races where I didn’t necessarily understand why we were doing something. But when you go out there and it responds positively to those changes, you gain that confidence right away. And I do. I have the same confidence in Darian that I had in Zippy for 10 years.”
When Biffle gave up the race lead late to take on four tires – a choice he made – the race verdict turned.
“I know I made a mistake,” he said, adding that crew chief Greg Erwin had been in favor of a two-tire change.
Erwin said the closing weeks of the Chase are likely to underline even more the importance of late-race decisions on tires, fuel strategy and similar matters.
“It just goes to show you it’s still all about track position,” he said of the Kansas finish. “We were kind of wishy-washy about what we were going to do and wound up getting beat by our own play, really.
“If you look at it through the course of every race, it does come down to that. They’re either fuel-mileage races or they’re pit strategy races. It’s very, very rare that there’s a race where everybody puts on four with 40 to go and the best car drives from eighth to the win. It just doesn’t play out like that very often. It’s all about
how you get off pit road in clean air.”
Stewart was Mr. Clean leaving Kansas.
