Joe Gibbs racing is climbing back on top!
Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2005 8:36 am
Looks like the folks over at Joe Gibbs Racing are getting their act together!! I'm glad to hear it!
Stewart on NASCAR upswing
By Chris Jenkins, USA TODAY
Although he insists that race car drivers are athletes, Tony Stewart admits he's in no shape to run up and down a basketball court or uncoil from a three-point stance to tackle a running back.
Tony Stewart isn't always ready to take engineers' suggestions at face value. "We just want them to climb in there with us and ride with us to prove (their points)."
By Joel Page, AP
Yet there was Stewart at New Hampshire International Speedway on Sunday, repeating an athletic feat he first performed three weeks ago in Daytona: He stopped his car on the frontstretch, hopped out and climbed up the trackside catchfence to salute fans in celebration of his third victory in the past four races. (Related item: NASCAR Super Stats)
"For a fat kid like me, it felt like Mount Everest," he said jokingly in a news conference.
But proving a driver can dominate NASCAR — rising from 10th to third in the Nextel Cup series points standings in the past five races — without renouncing fast food and milkshakes is not the most significant aspect of Stewart's recent hot streak.
Stewart also has shown that the sport's big-money megateams, Roush Racing and Hendrick Motorsports, don't necessarily have dibs on the championship this year — which wasn't so obvious a month ago. Before Stewart's June 26 win at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., the Roush and Hendrick teams had combined to win 13 of the first 15 races.
Stewart won the championship in NASCAR's top series in 2002 and is widely regarded as one of the most talented drivers. But a great driver can't win without good cars and good chemistry with his crewmembers, and things weren't quite clicking for Joe Gibbs Racing's No. 20 team earlier in the year.
Asked what has changed, Stewart, 34, professes ignorance — "My side of it is the three pedals, the steering and the shifter."
He defers such questions to his crew chief, Greg Zipadelli, who says the team is building better cars than earlier in the season but that the main difference is in the team's attitude. After several strong runs fizzled into so-so finishes over the first five months, Zipadelli could tell team members were hanging their heads.
"It's like being married," Zipadelli says. "You've been together that long, you know when you need to step up and bring some things up."
Zipadelli spoke separately to team members and to Stewart. He tried to get them all to view races such as the Daytona 500 in February, when Stewart led the most laps but didn't win, not as evidence of the team's failures but as proof of their potential.
"It's easy to look and get depressed, but it's easy to look at it and be encouraged," Zipadelli says. "We should have been second, third in points (earlier). And I'm not looking for what-ifs, I'm just saying: The way we ran and the laps that we led? To me, that was encouraging."
Teamwork not underrated
Roush fields a series-high five cars, and Hendrick has four; no other team has more than three in most races.
The two megateams have distinct advantages over medium-size teams such as Gibbs. With more cars, they have more advertising space to sell, bringing in more money, which allows them to hire talented drivers and crewmembers and carry out more extensive research and development.
And with hundreds of employees, the megateams have more engineering and mechanical minds trying to figure out how to make their cars go faster. In theory, a technical breakthrough found by one Roush crew is shared with all the other Roush crews, giving them all an advantage.
Recognizing the trend, the Gibbs team that previously fielded cars only for Stewart and veteran Bobby Labonte added a third car this season, for 29-year-old driver Jason Leffler. But the bigger-is-better theory doesn't work unless the crew working on each car is contributing to the team's overall pool of knowledge.
Home win would be sweet
When Tony Stewart isn't racing, he usually can be found at his boyhood home in Columbus, Ind., which he has owned since 1996. He enjoys being around the neighbors who knew him when he was young.
"It's home," Stewart says. "It's not a fancy house by any means. But it's a nice neighborhood. The neighbors wave to you when you go by, whether they know you or not - and I'm not saying me (specifically), I mean each other."
Around race weekends, midweek test sessions and sponsor appearances, the days of a driver regularly showing up at his team's race shop are long gone. But like most top drivers, Stewart has a private plane, allowing him to get to Joe Gibbs Racing's headquarters outside Charlotte fairly quickly if needed by crew chief Greg Zipadelli.
"If Zippy called me and said, 'I need you at the shop as soon as you can get here,' I can be at the shop in 3 1/2 hours," Stewart says. "If I was somewhere else in Charlotte, it could take me an hour, hour-and-a half."
As an Indiana native who grew up dreaming of racing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Stewart will again be under pressure to win the Aug. 7 Cup race at the famed track. He has run well in the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR's Brickyard 400 but has never won either event.
After winning Sunday's race at New Hampshire International Speedway, Stewart said he would trade his 2002 NASCAR title for a win at Indianapolis.
— By Chris Jenkins
Teammates Labonte and Leffler have struggled all season, essentially leaving Stewart and his team to take on Hendrick and Roush without much technical help from their teammates.
"When you don't all run good, it's hard to lean on them to help you when you're struggling," Zipadelli says. "But that's just the way the world turns. I mean, we're going to have our days when we don't run good, and hopefully they'll be running good and we'll be able to lean on them. Right now, it's our turn to help them as much as we can."
Rival team owner Ray Evernham, who is adding a third car next season to try to keep up with Hendrick and Roush, praises the chemistry that Stewart and Zipadelli have shown this year. He also notes that Gibbs' three cars bring in plenty of sponsorship money. So the David/Goliath template doesn't really fit their attempt to topple Roush and Hendrick.
"The other (Gibbs) teams may not be contributing on the group I.Q. side," Evernham says. "But as far as having the resources and things to do the job, they've probably got plenty."
Labonte finished third at New Hampshire on Sunday, another positive sign for the Gibbs team. And while Hendrick driver Jimmie Johnson continues to lead the points standings, followed by Roush driver Greg Biffle, other drivers for the two megateams have cooled off.
Hendrick's Jeff Gordon is caught in a major slump. Roush sensation Carl Edwards has finished outside the top 30 in three of the past four races.
Johnson isn't surprised at Stewart's success. "You expect to see those guys up front," he said in a teleconference Tuesday. "I think they're getting their stuff sorted out at the right time."
Engineers vs. drivers
Stewart won't be convinced that Gibbs has closed the gap with Roush and Hendrick until they face off at intermediate-length tracks such as Michigan International Speedway (Aug. 21) or California Speedway (Sept. 4). Those are tracks where technology and engineering, areas where Roush and Hendrick seem to hold an advantage, play a crucial role.
"You look at where Hendrick and Roush have been really dominant, that's the tracks where they've really been dominant," Stewart says.
Today's top teams rely on engineers' computer simulations, rather than drivers' seat-of-the-pants feel, to determine which suspension adjustments they should make to help their cars adapt to different tracks.
But with engineers calling more of the shots, driver comfort sometimes takes a back seat.
To an engineer, computer data might suggest a particular set of suspension adjustments should make a car faster. But the changes might not necessarily feel right to a driver, especially a veteran who knows what he wants his car to feel like.
When an engineer suggests a change that should make a car two-tenths of a second faster per lap, Stewart says, "We just want them to climb in there with us and ride with us to prove that."
Stewart seems to view engineers as a necessary evil, but he says he appreciates that his main engineer, Adam Stevens, used to be a racer. Stevens, who turns 27 Friday, comes from a racing family and drove in grassroots races in the Midwest when he was a student at Ohio University.
"I think you get a better understanding that the driver does have to be comfortable," Stevens says of his racing experience. "And you can hear in the tone of his voice if he's not comfortable with the changes you've made — even if it is a direction that the data says you should go."
Stevens clearly isn't calling any shots on the No. 20 team: "Tony knows what he wants, and Zippy (Zipadelli) knows how to get him there. I'm just here to help."
Zipadelli says the talk about engineers taking over NASCAR is more hype than reality. "It's not this earth-shattering revolution, to me, that it's perceived in the world outside. To me and our team, I don't believe it's changed much."
Weighty issues provide laughs
In recent weeks, Stewart has turned his sarcastic sense of humor on himself during postrace news conferences, eliciting laughs with self-deprecating one-liners about his fitness.
Sunday, Stewart joked that he would have to hire a trainer because he intends to win more races and climb more fences in celebration.
Stewart isn't dramatically overweight — NASCAR's media guide mercifully does not list drivers' weights — but his everyman physique does seem better suited to writing about big-time sports than competing in them. (Although it should be noted he advanced to the second round of Fox Sports' recent "NASCAR's sexiest driver" Internet poll, then was beaten by Dale Earnhardt Jr.)
Asked if a person needs to be in shape to be a race car driver, Stewart asks, "Did I beat the guys that were in shape?"
However, Stewart says he does have a specific kind of athleticism. Racers obviously must have remarkable hand-eye coordination and fearlessness, but Stewart says people might overlook the role endurance plays in racing.
"I think you've got to be in shape to a certain degree," Stewart says. "I mean, I'm not going to go out there and run up and down the basketball court for 48 minutes and survive. And I'm not going to sit there on a line and jump off of a three-point stance, run into somebody and knock them down. But I can sit in a 140-degree car for 3½ hours. You can't.
"We sit all day, but we sit on a hot piece of metal. We sit in a car (where) the temperature's hot. It's just a different type of conditioning than a guy that's running up and down the court."
Johnson says that because Stewart spends his free time racing in non-NASCAR events for fun, it keeps him in racing shape.
"There's a lot of muscle in there, I promise you," Johnson said in Tuesday's teleconference.
Stewart also can climb the heck out of a fence, but he's not doing so to prove his athleticism. Instead, his fence climbs seem to be an attempt to bond with fans — something Stewart has struggled to do since joining the Cup series in 1999, largely the result of negative publicity from past temperamental outbursts.
Stewart didn't invent the fence-climbing victory celebration; Indy Racing League driver Helio Castroneves popularized it several years ago.
But Stewart believes he's climbing higher than Castroneves. And he likes the view.
"It didn't matter if (fans) liked me or hated me, they were still cheering," he said in his post-win news conference. "I'm probably going to bust my butt, but I'm going to keep trying it."
Stewart on NASCAR upswing
By Chris Jenkins, USA TODAY
Although he insists that race car drivers are athletes, Tony Stewart admits he's in no shape to run up and down a basketball court or uncoil from a three-point stance to tackle a running back.
Tony Stewart isn't always ready to take engineers' suggestions at face value. "We just want them to climb in there with us and ride with us to prove (their points)."
By Joel Page, AP
Yet there was Stewart at New Hampshire International Speedway on Sunday, repeating an athletic feat he first performed three weeks ago in Daytona: He stopped his car on the frontstretch, hopped out and climbed up the trackside catchfence to salute fans in celebration of his third victory in the past four races. (Related item: NASCAR Super Stats)
"For a fat kid like me, it felt like Mount Everest," he said jokingly in a news conference.
But proving a driver can dominate NASCAR — rising from 10th to third in the Nextel Cup series points standings in the past five races — without renouncing fast food and milkshakes is not the most significant aspect of Stewart's recent hot streak.
Stewart also has shown that the sport's big-money megateams, Roush Racing and Hendrick Motorsports, don't necessarily have dibs on the championship this year — which wasn't so obvious a month ago. Before Stewart's June 26 win at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., the Roush and Hendrick teams had combined to win 13 of the first 15 races.
Stewart won the championship in NASCAR's top series in 2002 and is widely regarded as one of the most talented drivers. But a great driver can't win without good cars and good chemistry with his crewmembers, and things weren't quite clicking for Joe Gibbs Racing's No. 20 team earlier in the year.
Asked what has changed, Stewart, 34, professes ignorance — "My side of it is the three pedals, the steering and the shifter."
He defers such questions to his crew chief, Greg Zipadelli, who says the team is building better cars than earlier in the season but that the main difference is in the team's attitude. After several strong runs fizzled into so-so finishes over the first five months, Zipadelli could tell team members were hanging their heads.
"It's like being married," Zipadelli says. "You've been together that long, you know when you need to step up and bring some things up."
Zipadelli spoke separately to team members and to Stewart. He tried to get them all to view races such as the Daytona 500 in February, when Stewart led the most laps but didn't win, not as evidence of the team's failures but as proof of their potential.
"It's easy to look and get depressed, but it's easy to look at it and be encouraged," Zipadelli says. "We should have been second, third in points (earlier). And I'm not looking for what-ifs, I'm just saying: The way we ran and the laps that we led? To me, that was encouraging."
Teamwork not underrated
Roush fields a series-high five cars, and Hendrick has four; no other team has more than three in most races.
The two megateams have distinct advantages over medium-size teams such as Gibbs. With more cars, they have more advertising space to sell, bringing in more money, which allows them to hire talented drivers and crewmembers and carry out more extensive research and development.
And with hundreds of employees, the megateams have more engineering and mechanical minds trying to figure out how to make their cars go faster. In theory, a technical breakthrough found by one Roush crew is shared with all the other Roush crews, giving them all an advantage.
Recognizing the trend, the Gibbs team that previously fielded cars only for Stewart and veteran Bobby Labonte added a third car this season, for 29-year-old driver Jason Leffler. But the bigger-is-better theory doesn't work unless the crew working on each car is contributing to the team's overall pool of knowledge.
Home win would be sweet
When Tony Stewart isn't racing, he usually can be found at his boyhood home in Columbus, Ind., which he has owned since 1996. He enjoys being around the neighbors who knew him when he was young.
"It's home," Stewart says. "It's not a fancy house by any means. But it's a nice neighborhood. The neighbors wave to you when you go by, whether they know you or not - and I'm not saying me (specifically), I mean each other."
Around race weekends, midweek test sessions and sponsor appearances, the days of a driver regularly showing up at his team's race shop are long gone. But like most top drivers, Stewart has a private plane, allowing him to get to Joe Gibbs Racing's headquarters outside Charlotte fairly quickly if needed by crew chief Greg Zipadelli.
"If Zippy called me and said, 'I need you at the shop as soon as you can get here,' I can be at the shop in 3 1/2 hours," Stewart says. "If I was somewhere else in Charlotte, it could take me an hour, hour-and-a half."
As an Indiana native who grew up dreaming of racing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Stewart will again be under pressure to win the Aug. 7 Cup race at the famed track. He has run well in the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR's Brickyard 400 but has never won either event.
After winning Sunday's race at New Hampshire International Speedway, Stewart said he would trade his 2002 NASCAR title for a win at Indianapolis.
— By Chris Jenkins
Teammates Labonte and Leffler have struggled all season, essentially leaving Stewart and his team to take on Hendrick and Roush without much technical help from their teammates.
"When you don't all run good, it's hard to lean on them to help you when you're struggling," Zipadelli says. "But that's just the way the world turns. I mean, we're going to have our days when we don't run good, and hopefully they'll be running good and we'll be able to lean on them. Right now, it's our turn to help them as much as we can."
Rival team owner Ray Evernham, who is adding a third car next season to try to keep up with Hendrick and Roush, praises the chemistry that Stewart and Zipadelli have shown this year. He also notes that Gibbs' three cars bring in plenty of sponsorship money. So the David/Goliath template doesn't really fit their attempt to topple Roush and Hendrick.
"The other (Gibbs) teams may not be contributing on the group I.Q. side," Evernham says. "But as far as having the resources and things to do the job, they've probably got plenty."
Labonte finished third at New Hampshire on Sunday, another positive sign for the Gibbs team. And while Hendrick driver Jimmie Johnson continues to lead the points standings, followed by Roush driver Greg Biffle, other drivers for the two megateams have cooled off.
Hendrick's Jeff Gordon is caught in a major slump. Roush sensation Carl Edwards has finished outside the top 30 in three of the past four races.
Johnson isn't surprised at Stewart's success. "You expect to see those guys up front," he said in a teleconference Tuesday. "I think they're getting their stuff sorted out at the right time."
Engineers vs. drivers
Stewart won't be convinced that Gibbs has closed the gap with Roush and Hendrick until they face off at intermediate-length tracks such as Michigan International Speedway (Aug. 21) or California Speedway (Sept. 4). Those are tracks where technology and engineering, areas where Roush and Hendrick seem to hold an advantage, play a crucial role.
"You look at where Hendrick and Roush have been really dominant, that's the tracks where they've really been dominant," Stewart says.
Today's top teams rely on engineers' computer simulations, rather than drivers' seat-of-the-pants feel, to determine which suspension adjustments they should make to help their cars adapt to different tracks.
But with engineers calling more of the shots, driver comfort sometimes takes a back seat.
To an engineer, computer data might suggest a particular set of suspension adjustments should make a car faster. But the changes might not necessarily feel right to a driver, especially a veteran who knows what he wants his car to feel like.
When an engineer suggests a change that should make a car two-tenths of a second faster per lap, Stewart says, "We just want them to climb in there with us and ride with us to prove that."
Stewart seems to view engineers as a necessary evil, but he says he appreciates that his main engineer, Adam Stevens, used to be a racer. Stevens, who turns 27 Friday, comes from a racing family and drove in grassroots races in the Midwest when he was a student at Ohio University.
"I think you get a better understanding that the driver does have to be comfortable," Stevens says of his racing experience. "And you can hear in the tone of his voice if he's not comfortable with the changes you've made — even if it is a direction that the data says you should go."
Stevens clearly isn't calling any shots on the No. 20 team: "Tony knows what he wants, and Zippy (Zipadelli) knows how to get him there. I'm just here to help."
Zipadelli says the talk about engineers taking over NASCAR is more hype than reality. "It's not this earth-shattering revolution, to me, that it's perceived in the world outside. To me and our team, I don't believe it's changed much."
Weighty issues provide laughs
In recent weeks, Stewart has turned his sarcastic sense of humor on himself during postrace news conferences, eliciting laughs with self-deprecating one-liners about his fitness.
Sunday, Stewart joked that he would have to hire a trainer because he intends to win more races and climb more fences in celebration.
Stewart isn't dramatically overweight — NASCAR's media guide mercifully does not list drivers' weights — but his everyman physique does seem better suited to writing about big-time sports than competing in them. (Although it should be noted he advanced to the second round of Fox Sports' recent "NASCAR's sexiest driver" Internet poll, then was beaten by Dale Earnhardt Jr.)
Asked if a person needs to be in shape to be a race car driver, Stewart asks, "Did I beat the guys that were in shape?"
However, Stewart says he does have a specific kind of athleticism. Racers obviously must have remarkable hand-eye coordination and fearlessness, but Stewart says people might overlook the role endurance plays in racing.
"I think you've got to be in shape to a certain degree," Stewart says. "I mean, I'm not going to go out there and run up and down the basketball court for 48 minutes and survive. And I'm not going to sit there on a line and jump off of a three-point stance, run into somebody and knock them down. But I can sit in a 140-degree car for 3½ hours. You can't.
"We sit all day, but we sit on a hot piece of metal. We sit in a car (where) the temperature's hot. It's just a different type of conditioning than a guy that's running up and down the court."
Johnson says that because Stewart spends his free time racing in non-NASCAR events for fun, it keeps him in racing shape.
"There's a lot of muscle in there, I promise you," Johnson said in Tuesday's teleconference.
Stewart also can climb the heck out of a fence, but he's not doing so to prove his athleticism. Instead, his fence climbs seem to be an attempt to bond with fans — something Stewart has struggled to do since joining the Cup series in 1999, largely the result of negative publicity from past temperamental outbursts.
Stewart didn't invent the fence-climbing victory celebration; Indy Racing League driver Helio Castroneves popularized it several years ago.
But Stewart believes he's climbing higher than Castroneves. And he likes the view.
"It didn't matter if (fans) liked me or hated me, they were still cheering," he said in his post-win news conference. "I'm probably going to bust my butt, but I'm going to keep trying it."
