Last August when the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series rolled into Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Tony Stewart was blunt in assessing his team’s performance. “We’re not setting the world on fire,” said Stewart before the race weekend even began. Then, after a ninth-place finish in the Pure Michigan 400, Stewart famously declared, “If we’re going to run this bad, it really doesn’t matter whether we make the Chase or not because we’re going to be occupying a spot in the Chase that somebody else that can actually run for a championship should take because our stuff is so bad right now, we’re wasting one of those top-12 spots.”
Stewart, of course, made the Chase, and in doing so, set the world on fire behind the wheel of his No. 14 Mobil 1/Office Depot Chevrolet. In record fashion, he won five of the season’s last 10 races en route to securing his third Sprint Cup championship in an epic finale where Stewart won the title over Carl Edwards by virtue of a tiebreaker, as Stewart’s fives wins trumped Edwards’ one.
The glow of the 2011 championship hasn’t waned in 2012, as Stewart has won three races and shares the No. 1 Chase seed with fellow three-time race winners Jimmie Johnson and Brad Keselowski. Augmenting those wins are eight top-threes, nine top-fives and 11 top-10s which currently place Stewart eighth in points.
Compare this season to last year at this time, when Stewart had zero wins and only two top-fives and eight top-10s, leaving him in the precarious position of 10th in points – the bubble spot to earn a guaranteed spot in the 12-driver Chase. Had Stewart fallen out of the top-10, he would’ve missed the Chase, for the 11th- and 12th-place spots are wild cards, reserved for the two drivers between 11th and 20th in points who have the most wins. Keselowski (three wins) and Hamlin (one win) earned those spots in 2011. A winless Stewart wouldn’t have been eligible.
When Stewart wasn’t biting his fingernails, he was using them to hold on to his top-10 point standing. He was successful, thanks to a third-place run in the second-to-last regular season race at Atlanta Motor Speedway and a seventh-place finish in the cutoff race at Richmond (Va.) International Raceway.
Stewart was in the Chase for the seventh time of his career, and with the Chase allowing him to hit a reset button on his season, he pulled off one of the biggest comebacks in sports history by winning the 2011 championship.
Eight months removed from hoisting the Sprint Cup trophy last November at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Stewart has remained in championship form, as his most recent run at Michigan attests.
When the series visited the 2-mile oval back in June, Stewart started eighth on the freshly paved track, led 18 laps and finished second. It was the second race of a nine-race run where Stewart finished among the top-12 seven times, four of which were top-three finishes, including a win July 7 at Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway. It was also Stewart’s eighth top-three finish at Michigan, a statistic which includes a victory in June 2000, where Stewart secured the second-longest advance to victory in a Sprint Cup race at Michigan after starting 28th.
That rallying spirit, which was evidenced in the Chase, has often been on display at Michigan. Stewart holds the record for greatest improvement from a starting position at Michigan, as the three-time and reigning Sprint Cup champion started 41st in the June 2007 race and advanced 38 positions to finish third, besting the previous mark of 36 places earned by Jimmy Spencer (40th to fourth) in the June 1996 race.
Despite an average start of 19.6 in his 27 career Sprint Cup races at Michigan, Stewart has an average finish of 11.2 thanks to 11 top-fives and 19 top-10s.
With a much better outlook in 2012 than he had in 2011, Stewart will look to add to those numbers come Sunday in the Pure Michigan 400.
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