[media-credit name=”Brad Keppel” align=”alignright” width=”224″]
[/media-credit]Considering the two have won the last seven NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championships, it was only fitting that it came down to the two of them to settle who would take home another one of NASCAR’s prestigious trophies on Saturday night.
The final 15 laps of the Bojangles Southern 500 at Darlington saw a dominant Jimmie Johnson leading but a charging Tony Stewart behind him. On the line for Johnson was his first win of the season, No. 200 for Hendrick Motorsports. On the line for Stewart was his third win of the season but very first at Darlington.
Johnson was able to pull away on the green-white-checkered finish with Stewart falling to third. While he came ever so close again to crossing another track of his winless list, Stewart wasn’t about to complain about the finish he and his No. 14 Office Depot / Mobile 1 team had to fight for.
“I was pretty frustrated about halfway through because we just kept fighting the same issues on the respective ends of the track,” said Stewart afterwards. “We just kept fighting loose and couldn’t get it tightened up in one and two and couldn’t do anything. Because we were trying to tighten it up in one and two, we didn’t really have the opportunity to try to free up three and four.
“It’s hard and frustrating when you got two different conditions going on. We basically fought that loose condition in one and two since we unloaded [Friday]. It just kind of was frustrating that we couldn’t find anything and couldn’t hit on it. After the first couple of runs of the race, having two or three chances to take a stab at it didn’t seem like we were making the direction. It was frustrating.
“It’s why we won a championship last year, too. We never give up. Steve [Addington, crew chief] kept me positive. He was calm the whole time. He kept saying, I’ll work on it; I’ll get it fixed. It just kept me calm. Sure enough, we finally got it to do one thing and then we could work on it from there and try to get it the rest of the way.”
Stewart bounced between the top 15 and the top 10 for the first 100 laps. The defending NSCS champions only able to make adjustments on the car during a fast paced race and green flag pit stops.
Finally the first caution flew on lap 172 for debris and soon cautions were flying often. By the races 200-lap mark Stewart had climbed to the top five and started to make his presence known. When the fourth caution flew on lap 298 Stewart pitted with the leaders but had to give up his fifth place position as the team took a look at his clutch and transmission.
It didn’t take long for Stewart to rebound. He quickly climbed back into contention and into Johnson’s rearview mirror for the finish.
“It ended up really good, I was really proud of Steve Addington and all of our crew,” Stewart said, noting how difficult the car was in the first half of the race. “Really proud of Addington. He just kept throwing things at it to try and get a direction. Once he got on what it was like, it got a lot better at the end there. We got both ends at least to do the same thing and we could balance it out from there.
“I broke the clutch with about 85 to go, came into the pits, they jacked it up and looked at it and figured out we could keep going. But we came in because we looked at it, took the option to come back in and top it off with fuel, just basically got the opportunity the next caution. When everybody came in, we got up to eighth, had two really good restarts after that got us up to second.”
Before the restart however, Stewart suffered another scare. He told the team he had only 20 pounds of fuel pressure and he wasn’t sure what to do. Without hesitation he was told to stay on the flat of the racetrack and Stewart was able to tell the team the pressure was building back up.
In the end though he just didn’t have enough for Johnson who drove away on the restart, Hamlin then getting around Stewart for second. The 14 just got too tight when he was behind Johnson and Stewart was hoping Johnson would spin his tires on the restart so he could have a shot at the win.
But the track Too Tough To Tame now has Stewart sitting winless in 20 career attempts and he remains seventh in the NSCS points.
“Coming to the green, we actually lost fuel pressure, with one to go and that’s why we were on the apron trying to get it back to the pickups,” said Stewart. “Got it back, but then lost it again coming off four to the green. Coming down the front straightaway on the restart it kind of laid down a little bit, that dropped us back to third.
“Considering the hurdles of the day, I’m pretty happy with a third-place run.”
