[media-credit id=22 align=”alignright” width=”189″]
[/media-credit]Three months ago Tony Stewart climbed out of his stock car in Florida and hoisted the Sprint Cup Series championship for the third time in his career.
It wasn’t the last time Stewart sat in a racecar though because since then he hasn’t stopped racing or winning, spending his off-season traveling around the county tearing up tracks. In fact, he looked through his calendar and made sure that he could be at every race possible, saying he’s happier at the track than at home.
Of course because he doesn’t have a fitness plan go to the gym, Stewart uses racing as his workout plan. Then if he wasn’t racing Stewart spent some time during the winter at Stewart-Haas Racing preparing for the 2012 season, hiring new people and making sure others were hard at work.
And while it might sound like all that took away from celebrating his championship, Stewart says the buzz still hasn’t worn off. The No. 14 Office Depot / Mobil 1 Chevrolet team soaked up every minute while at the awards banquet in Las Vegas but then got back to work, working towards even bigger accomplishments this season.
“We were immediately back on the job of trying to figure out how to do the same thing this year,” said Stewart Thursday in Daytona. “It was easy to do that having Zippy {Greg Zipadelli} and Steve Addington come on board, guys that weren’t really with us when we won the championship at the end of the year. Their focus was on what we were going to do this year. So it kind of got the whole mindset of the shop to not get lazy and think about what we accomplished last year and get working on what we can do to try to repeat this year.”
Time will tell if that hard work had paid off, teams will measure themselves against the competition once the season is a few weeks old. What Stewart accomplished last season though is hard not to talk about: winning five races in the Chase after struggling in the first 26.
His hot streak in the Chase is something that Stewart, even months later, doesn’t have an explanation for.
“I can’t, I still can’t,” said Stewart when asked. “I wish I could explain it. The way our year went, it was like the first 26 weeks anything that could go wrong went wrong, something went wrong every week. The days that we didn’t have a problem, we just missed it on the set up. The days that we were good, something would happen, we would have pit strategy go wrong or something would happen. Those last 10 weeks, with the exception of Dover, everything kind of went right.”
It put Stewart back at the top of the NASCAR mountain while giving him his first championship as an owner as well. But now that the 2012 season has begun and with the Daytona 500 just a little over a week away Stewart’s looking for another first.
With everything that he’s accomplished in NASCAR since 1999 he still has yet to win the Great American Race. When he takes the green flag on February 26 it will be his 14th attempt and it’s the only thing on his mind and bucket list right now.
“Very high on it,” he said. “Especially these next two weeks, it is the highest thing on it.”
Stewart has won at Daytona before, he’s won everything else there is to win, just not its biggest event. After leading the most laps in 2004 and holding the lead with 20 laps to go, it was Dale Earnhardt Jr. who ended up in victory lane. In 2007 he and Kurt Busch dominated the event, only for the two of them to end up in the fence while racing for the lead with less than 50 laps to.
A year later he was blown by on the last lap by Busch and now teammate Ryan Newman. Stewart’s been upside down and end over end in the big race too even though he’s been nearly untouchable in the July events. In 2005 and 2006 he won back-to-back Coke Zero 400s before adding a third in 2009.
“I think it is just the Daytona 500,” Stewart said on why it’s so hard to win in February. “You look at some of the greatest finishes of our sport they have come from the Daytona 500 and some of the wildest craziest finishes, fights on the backstretch, you name it we have had it here.”
One day Stewart will have his moment there too, he and his fans hope it’ll be next weekend. But if it’s not and they have to wait another year to try add it onto his resume, he’ll do so gladly.
“I wouldn’t trade three championships to win Daytona,” he said. “It’s not a good feeling to not have that tally in the win column. Realistically, two tracks we haven’t won at and the Daytona 500 we haven’t won at, everything else we have pretty much accomplished in this sport that we want to accomplish. It’s the biggest race of the year; everyone wants to win that race. I won’t say that it is not a complete career if you don’t win it but there is a lot of priority on this. Darrell Waltrip and Dale {Earnhardt} Sr. both had to go a long time before they got it.”
And if anyone’s wondering if Stewart pictures himself winning the event anytime he comes to Florida, don’t count on it.
“No, I don’t know how you could,” he said. “I don’t know how you could honestly sit there and imagine what that moment would be like. You just hope you get to live it.”
