All it took was a sly smile and an exaggerated wink to understand what Tony Stewart was really saying.
“I’m wasting a spot here,” Stewart quipped, echoing the sentiment he expressed before the 2011 Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.
After downplaying his chances five years ago, however, Stewart proceeded to win the first two Chase races and ultimately beat Carl Edwards in a tiebreaker for his third Cup title.
On Thursday afternoon in the Ready.Set.Chase Launch Event at the Bridgeport Art Center’s Skyline Loft, Stewart wasn’t about to change his approach.
“I’m going back to 2011 notes, and that’s where I’m standing, man,” Stewart said. “I’m very superstitious.”
But there are distinct differences between then and now. In 2011, Stewart hadn’t won a race when the Chase started. This year, he qualified for the 10-race playoff with a strategic victory at Sonoma, and with the speed he’s shown this year, handicappers probably have a higher opinion of his chances than they did five years ago.
Then again, Stewart has never competed in the current Chase format, with three-race elimination rounds and a championship finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“I’m ready to go this weekend, and I’ll take it a race at a time,” Stewart said. “I mean, this Chase is going to be pretty intense in itself. You’ve got 16 great drivers in here. You got three-week segments where you keep knocking four guys off.
“So it’s going to be pretty crazy these last 10 weeks.”
In a six-race stretch following his Sonoma win, Stewart finished second once and fifth three times, but he enters the Chase short on momentum—with consecutive results of 30th, 21st, 35th and 33rd.
But as Stewart proved dramatically with five Chase wins in 2011, the previous 26 races don’t matter much when the championship is on the line.
Defending Champion Optimistic As Chase Begins
After missing the first 11 races of the 2015 season because of an injury, Kyle Busch was considered a long shot to make the Chase, much less win it.
But Busch proved the doubters wrong by advancing through the first three rounds of the Chase—twice by the skin of his teeth—and then winning the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway to secure his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship.
Though Busch has notched just three top-10 finishes since winning at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in July, he likes his position as he begins defense of his title this weekend at Chicagoland Speedway. After all, with four victories this season, he’s the No. 1 seed in the Chase field.
“We’ve got a lot of expectations on us in being last year’s champion,” Busch said on Thursday at the Ready.Set.Chase Launch Event. “We have a lot of expectations on us, but I feel as though being able to win the championship last year, it sort of solidified my career a little bit more, but also gave us the opportunity to know that we’re a championship team and we can do this.
“We’ve just got to make sure that things kind of go our way and you’ve got to have a little bit of luck on your side in order to get there to the end and be championship eligible at Homestead.”
With 13 victories in the 26 regular-season races, Busch and fellow Toyota drivers Denny Hamlin, Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Martin Truex, Jr. have established themselves as consensus Chase favorites. Which drivers survive until the Championship 4 Round at Homestead will depend on the vagaries of the elimination format, Busch says.
Busch, Hamlin, Edwards and Kenseth have won a combined 11 events under the Joe Gibbs Racing banner. Truex has added two more for affiliated Furniture Row Racing.
“We’ve won a lot of races, but yet we’re all going to be going there and competing against each other, and I think it’s just going to be probably the process of natural elimination that happens that one or however many of us will be eliminated throughout the process just due to unforeseen circumstances,” Busch told the NASCAR Wire Service.
“How many of us will be there at the end? Obviously, (JGR team owner) Joe (Gibbs) would hope that it’s all four of us, and whether or not that happens is yet to be seen.”
The Changing Of The Guard
Chase Elliott has been a long-time fan of Tony Stewart—even though it took him a long time to say so.
And Elliott is gratified Stewart waited until 2016 to embark on his retirement tour.
“Tony is a guy I’ve looked up to for a long time,” said Elliott, who, along with Chris Buescher, is representing the Sunoco rookie class in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. “As many of you guys know, Tony was the first guy, other than my dad (Bill Elliott), I was ever okay with pulling for. I’ve always had a lot of respect for him.
“It’s kind of funny watching him and how he is with Kevin (Harvick’s) son Keelan. I kind of remember that being kind of how he was with me, which is kind of cool. I could assume Keelan will have some of those memories as he grows up and looks back at going to the racetrack with his dad.”
Stewart’s presence on the track has added a special quality to Elliott’s rookie season.
“I’ve enjoyed racing with him,” Elliott said. “I’m glad that he decided to wait one more year (to retire from Sprint Cup racing), because that’s a pretty special moment for me to be able to race against one of my heroes like that.
“So, you know, I don’t necessarily look at him any different than I do anybody else when it comes to a competitor or how you treat anyone. But, you know, I think he’s obviously done a good job. I have a lot of respect for him. I expect him to be strong in these next few weeks.”
Stewart remembers the four-year-old Elliott hanging around his car.
“I didn’t even know he could talk, because for the first three years I knew him, he never said one word to me,” Stewart said. “But he would be at the car every week. Bill would bring him to the car every week because he wanted to come down and see us.
“I got him to smile maybe four or five times in the three years. You knew he was engaged. You knew he wanted to be there. You could see it in his eyes. But he never spoke. He never said one word for the first three years. When he got a little older, he started talking finally.
“I didn’t know if he was going to be mute or what. I didn’t know if he could talk.”
As Stewart will attest, talking isn’t the only thing the 20-year-old Elliott can do now. He can also drive a race car—fast enough to qualify for the Chase as a rookie.
WDUN will have live MRN Radio coverage of Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 400 from Chicagoland Speedway beginning at 1:30 pm on 102.9 FM.
