NASCAR Cup Series

Stenhouse has swagger of a champion

Published Apr. 18, 2012 1:00 a.m. ET

foxsports

Ricky Stenhouse Jr. sat between Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards last November as the three awaited their respective NASCAR Championship Weekend news conferences in Miami. The three were smiling, laughing and telling tales.

Stenhouse couldn’t have looked more comfortable between the pair of NASCAR superstars.

Maybe that’s because he appears destined to join that high-wattage club.

With a pair of victories in six Nationwide Series races this season — he has now doubled his career win total — the 24-year-old Mississippi native has positioned himself well to defend his 2011 Nationwide championship.

Stenhouse's dramatic victory Friday at Texas Motor Speedway pulled him to four points of leader Elliott Sadler before the next series stop, April 27 in Richmond, Va.

The new cowboy hat he earned for winning in the Lone Star State couldn’t have been more appropriate for Stenhouse, who is also fond of cowboy boots and big buckles. Proudly sporting his newest addition atop his head, Stenhouse stood alongside legendary team owner Jack Roush in victory circle Friday and looked every bit in his element.

As he explained only days earlier: “Every time we show up at a racetrack, we feel we are a team everyone is looking at, a team they have to beat. We show up every week thinking we should win the pole, lead the most laps and win the race. I’m pretty mad when we don’t."

Which made him a pretty ornery guy a couple of years ago.

After a successful run in USAC Sprints and Midgets — he drove for Stewart in 2007 — Stenhouse made the transition to stock cars and was not an immediate success. In his 2010 full-season Nationwide debut, his number of DNFs (five) approached his top-10 finishes (eight). Yet he persevered through the rocky learning experience to win the Rookie of the Year title.

Buoyed by Roush’s vote of confidence, his belief in himself and a plenty of natural talent, Stenhouse in 2011 more than tripled his top-10 output (28). He had 16 top-five runs and collected the first two wins of his career (both at Iowa Speedway) — all as his team searched month by month for sponsorship on his No. 6 Ford Mustang.

"Ricky’s right on track," Roush said. “In his first year (2010), he did what a rookie should do and did it with great enthusiasm and closed the deal he undertook. Last year, he got it right. Sometimes, defending a championship is more difficult than winning the first, but Ricky is in championship form.

"But I think Ricky is getting better at every metric you could apply to driving."

Stenhouse's friendly, easygoing, fun-loving attitude off-track isn’t hurting him, either. Stenhouse carries the intangible that elevates winning drivers into stars.

His Twitter handle, @StenhouseJr., has a robust following of 35,000 people who know from his daily tweets that he is a loyal churchgoer, enjoys his dad’s homemade breakfasts on race morning and was particularly happy for Masters winner Bubba Watson because they're both left-handers.

Last week in Texas, Stenhouse quietly volunteered to help out in the tornado cleanup. Early in the week, he charmed a crowd of primarily French-speaking reporters in Montreal, even sampling the local syrup and declaring in his distinctive Southern drawl that the Circuit de Gilles Villeneuve was among his favorite places anywhere to race.

Seldom without a smile or a playful jab to offer, he is a garage favorite. One of his closest friends is Danica Patrick, a friendship forged when the two open-wheelers became Nationwide Series rookies.

Unlike some Nationwide drivers, Stenhouse has never begrudged the Sprint Cup Series regulars who run Nationwide part time. That’s part of the challenge Stenhouse cherishes. He considers it an advanced course.

Beating them provides an extra level of satisfaction — and confidence. At one point, his toughest challenger from the Cup ranks came from within his own Roush-Fenway organization: Carl Edwards. More often than not, it seemed Stenhouse and Edwards settled the Nationwide Series checkered flags in 2011. And neither the highly motivated up-and-comer nor the steely veteran was willing to give an inch with a victory on the line.

The most famous example of that came at Iowa Speedway last August when an angry Edwards gave his young teammate Stenhouse the finger at midrace. Stenhouse went on to win — besting Edwards at the line. Stenhouse admitted he was bothered by the disrespectful gesture, but he wouldn’t have changed the way he raced.

As the season continued, Stenhouse never backed down. And the two ended the year with a healthy respect for each other — and Stenhouse with his first NASCAR championship.

"Obviously, we feel a lot of relief this year,’’ Stenhouse said. “We started feeling the relief about halfway through last year and kind of turned it around. But when you're crashing all the time and tearing up race cars, it definitely kills your confidence.

"But the good thing is Jack and everybody at Ford Racing and everybody in our company kind of stood behind us and let me figure things out. We got it figured out, and, like I said, we're having a lot of fun this year and we're in contention to win this championship. I think everything so far has paid off.’’