Tony Stewart Making Small, Positive Steps in Quest for Season-Saving Chase Bid

Slowly but surely, baby step after baby step, Tony Stewart is starting to come back.

The man we know as Smoke has been nothing but a wisp of his old self in 2015, off to the worst single-season start of his NASCAR career.

And that’s a career that dates back to 1999.

Trying to come up with an explanation for why Stewart has struggled like he never has before is like trying to balance the U.S. budget: It can’t be done.

But after poor performance after poor performance, we are starting to see some sunlight on Stewart’s horizon.

He earned his second-best finish of the season in Sunday’s Windows 10 400 at Pocono. His only better finish thus far this season was at Bristol this spring when he finished eighth.

So, after 21 races on the 36-race Sprint Cup schedule, Stewart has just a pair of top 10s.

There’s even more light shining from Stewart’s aura, as well.

In case you may have missed it, he’s done well in recent practice sessions and, in particular, during qualifying.

Stewart has qualified in the top five in each of the past two races: fourth at Indianapolis last week and fifth for Sunday’s race at Pocono.

Again, these are baby steps, but they’re forward steps nonetheless.

“I think we’re starting to kind of get a read on this thing a little bit,” Stewart said in his post-race media release. “I’m not going to say after two weeks that we’ve got it figured out, because that would be very premature, but at least this weekend we got going a lot better than we had been.

“I’m hopeful the rest of it will start to come around a little bit. And at least this is some momentum.”

While Stewart and his team are hoping that his momentum continues, this will likely be a difficult week—and it has nothing to do with the performance struggles he’s had this season.

Sunday will not only be the next Sprint Cup race at Watkins Glen International; it will also mark the one-year anniversary of the tragic accident Stewart was involved in that took the life of young racer Kevin Ward Jr.

How Stewart gets through this week, and whether it will impact his recent performance uptick, remains to be seen.

The memory of that accident notwithstanding, the fact remains that Stewart is returning to the track where he has had the most success in his career.

That’s right. In 14 starts at The Glen, Stewart has a career-best five wins, along with seven top-five and 10 top-10 finishes.

Of all the five tracks remaining in the so-called “Race to the Chase”—the prelude, if you will, to the upcoming Chase For the Sprint Cup—WGI gives Stewart the best chance of earning a win and potentially qualifying for NASCAR’s 10 race marquee event.

That’s not to say Stewart, who has not won a Cup race in more than two years, can’t win at the other remaining tracks leading up to the Chase after Watkins Glen.

There’s Michigan (one win), Bristol (one win), Darlington (no wins) and Richmond (three wins).

But his best chance, without question, is Sunday on the upstate New York road course.

Just as hard as it is to believe that Stewart hasn’t won a race since June 2, 2013, at Dover International Speedway, there’s an even greater conundrum. Stewart, a three-time Sprint Cup champion, has not taken part in the Chase since 2012.

He missed it in 2013 after breaking his right leg in a sprint car race in Iowa. He also missed last year’s Chase because he didn’t win a race in the 33 he started and missed three other races after the tragedy at Watkins Glen.

If Stewart is to show that the recent baby steps he’s taken have sole in them, he has to take some giant strides and win one of the next five races to make the Chase, period.

As parents know all too well, a baby must learn to crawl and then walk before running.

With what he’s done over the past few weeks, it would appear that Stewart is ready to run.

Let’s hope, for him, that run heads right to Victory Lane.

Follow me on Twitter @JerryBonkowski