Another upside to the program is their valued partnership with Hendrick, the super-team in which Haas receives engines from. Keep in mind that Hendrick has won more races that any other Sprint Cup team throughout the last five years.
Granted, there is potential for a bright future at Stewart-Haas Racing. At 37 years of age, Tony Stewart’s window of opportunity is closing, and his best chance to win another championship is with Gibbs.
I cannot see a championship anywhere on the horizon at Stewart-Haas, because in a league as competitive as the NASCAR Sprint Cup series, teams are not born and then winning titles soon thereafter.
The teams that win big are Gibbs, Hendrick, Roush—the already established "mega-teams", kind of like the Yankees and Red Sox in Major League Baseball. Going along with that analogy, Stewart-Haas Racing would be the upstart Tampa Bay Rays.
Stewart’s tenure with JGR has produced eye-popping results. Other than his two championships, he has garnered 32 wins (and counting…), 126 top-five finishes, and two victories at the Brickyard 400.
Crew chief Greg Zipadelli has been with Stewart every step of the way throughout his prosperous career, and together they make one of the most potent driver/crew chief combinations in NASCAR. They have been paired up longer than any active driver-crew chief tandem, and only Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus have more wins together than Stewart and Zipadelli.
Being without Zippy next season will have an extremely significant impact on Stewart’s performance, as his crew chief of 10 years announced that he would remain with JGR and work with Joey Logano, the 18-year-old phenom who is replacing Smoke in car 20.
The dynamic duo has yet to score a win in 2008, but has had quite a few slip through their fingers, like at the Coca Cola 600 when Stewart had a tire go down with two laps to go as he was cruising to the win.
Nevertheless, don’t look for Smoke to go winless on the season (he has a great shot at getting that first win of the ’08 campaign this weekend at Watkins Glen, all you Fantasy NASCAR geeks).
And, even though he has not been in contention to win every single race so far this season like his teammate Kyle Busch, Stewart’s car has been one of the most consistent front-runners (seven top-fives, 10 top-tens), and he will in all likelihood make the Chase for the fourth time in the playoff’s five-year existence.
With the kind of success that he has found at JGR, in addition to the success that the team itself has enjoyed over the years, I think that Stewart would be crazy to ditch Gibbs. But, as they always say, money talks, and there’s a lot more money for Stewart in running his own race team than there is in driving for somebody else’s!
Besides being one rich son of a gun, love him or hate him, Stewart is truly one of the most talented drivers in NASCAR’s most elite series, and if anybody can pull through and turn heads with an unfamiliar, unsung organization, he would be just the guy to do it.
Will he turn heads to the point where analysts are comparing his run with his new team to Kyle Busch’s this season or Jimmie Johnson’s the last couple of seasons?
My answer to that is a definitive "no".
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