You knew Tony Stewart was hungry when he started off the year talking about how much weight he’s lost and his new commitment to physical fitness.
It appears Stewart was hungry for something more than just food.
A few months after stumbling down the stretch last season, Stewart is off to one of the fastest starts in his career and served notice last week at Las Vegas Motor Speedway that he intends to be a force to be reckoned with this year.
With finishes of 13th, seventh and second in the first three races, Stewart is tied with Kurt Busch atop the Sprint Cup points standings.
More importantly, he has been a force in all three events.
He was racing for the win in the final laps of the Daytona 500 before getting shuffled back on the last lap. At Phoenix, he led 59 laps and had the lead until the final pit stop, when his strategy backfired and cost him several positions on the final run.
At Las Vegas, Stewart dominated the race, leading a race-high 163 laps before a pit-road penalty knocked him back in the field and forced him to play pit strategy again. It cost him the lead, but he rallied for an impressive runner-up finish in a race he contends he should have won.
“It just kills me to throw a race away like that,” he said.
Though he was dejected after the race, he has to be thrilled with the way he has started the season. It is his best start since he started Stewart-Haas Racing in 2009. Better even than the 2009 season, when he won four races and led the points standings at the end of the 26-race regular season.
Stewart took a big gamble when he left Joe Gibbs Racing — where he won 33 Cup races and two championships — to become the owner of his own team.
He looked like a genius when he led the points standings much of the 2009 season, but faded badly during the final few races and wound up sixth in the final standings.
His struggles carried over into last season when he had just three top-10 finishes in the first 11 races. He didn’t recover until midsummer, putting together a hot streak just before the Chase, including a win at Atlanta in September. He won again at California, but stumbled through the Chase and wound up seventh in the final standings.
Stewart’s first two seasons as an owner/driver have been marked by inconsistency — incredible hot streaks followed by prolonged slumps. He’s won six races and shown the potential to challenge the sport’s elite teams, but has not been able to sustain it over a full year.
This might finally be the year that Stewart and Stewart-Haas Racing are ready to take the next step. Not only is Stewart off to a fast start, but teammate Ryan Newman sits fifth in points with two top-five finishes. And he, too, was in position to win the Daytona 500 before getting swept into a late wreck.
Does Stewart think his organization has caught the top teams at Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, Richard Childress Racing and Roush Fenway Racing?
“Yeah, I mean, we've proven it two years in a row. We've done it,” he said. “We've won seven races in the last two years. We've been able to do that.
“The hard part every year is it's a question mark because you don't know if what you've done is going to be good enough. You hope that the hard work that everybody has put through during the winter, you see those results right away.”
So far, Stewart is. Typically known as a slow starter, he’s not only off to his best start with his own team, but it’s his best start since 2004, when he opened the season with finishes of second and third in two of the first three races (26th in the other).
He got off to solid starts from 2006-2008 with Gibbs, but each of those seasons included an early 43rd-place finish that buried him in points.
His start is better even than his two championship seasons in 2002 and ’05.
If the first three races — and particularly Sunday’s performance at Las Vegas — are an indication, Stewart is back to his 2009 form and poised for a serious championship run. He likes to remind people that he was the last champion before Jimmie Johnson began his five-year reign.
At age 39, does he have another Sprint Cup title in him?
“If I don't, you won't see me driving a race car anymore,” he said. “I'm not going to do this unless I feel like I have a shot to win races and championships. I'm not going to hang on and ride out a career. That's not what this is to me.”
Chances are, Stewart has at least one more title run in him.
And based on his fast start, it could come this season.
