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| Stewart will be looking for his eighth road course win Sunday (Getty) |
Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., is the first road course stop on the tour, and it plays host to this weekend’s Toyota/Save Mart 350k. The other road course is Watkins Glen (N.Y.) International, which welcomes the Sprint Cup Series in mid-August.
Both tracks force drivers to turn left and right, and both have suited Tony Stewart well. The driver of the No. 14 Office Depot/Mobil 1 Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing has scored seven of his 39 career Sprint Cup wins on road courses – two at Sonoma and five at Watkins Glen.
Stewart’s middle-of-the-road balance has made him king of the road, for in addition to his seven wins, the two-time Sprint Cup champion has 11 top-twos, 18 top-10s and has led a total of 304 laps in 24 career road course starts. In fact, Stewart has only two finishes lower than 15th – 26th at Watkins Glen in 2001 and 28th at Sonoma in 2006 – to give him an average road course finish of 7.3.
At Sonoma alone, Stewart’s two wins (2001 and 2005) are augmented by one pole (2002), two second-place finishes, four top-fives and eight top-10s, and his average finish at the 1.99-mile, 10-turn track is 9.2.
Finishing up front has come in large part from Stewart starting up front. In his 24 road course races, Stewart has started within the first two rows 10 times, and he has qualified in the top-10 15 times.
Proving the racing adage true of, “To finish first, you must first finish,” Stewart has never recorded a DNF (Did Not Finish) in any of his road course starts and has a lap completion rate of 100 percent.
And Stewart’s road course success isn’t limited to Sprint Cup. Outside of NASCAR’s elite series, Stewart scored a road course win in IROC. He won Round 3 of IROC XXX on the Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway road course en route to the series championship in 2006. Stewart has also competed in the prestigious Rolex 24 Hours At Daytona five times, with a best finish of third in 2005.
So, if you’re looking for a candidate this weekend who embraces both the left and right turns of Infineon Raceway, look no further than Stewart.
TONY STEWART, Driver of the No. 14 Office Depot/Mobil 1 Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing:
You’ve had a tremendous amount of success at Sonoma. Why?
“I just like the road courses. I’ve always liked Sonoma. It’s really a driver’s track. It’s tough to make your car drive perfect all day. You can have a really good car, but it’s going to slide around and you’re going to struggle for grip, and that’s what makes it so fun. You have to do the work behind the steering wheel.”
What does it take to win at Sonoma?
“You’ve just got to have a good handling car. Aerodynamics are not the least bit important at Sonoma, which is great because it’s one of the few tracks that we go to that we don’t have to worry about aero balance or anything like that. It’s just a matter of keeping a well-balanced car all day and having good pit stops and pit strategy and staying out of trouble.
“A lot can happen at Sonoma. You’ve got to be patient all day. You get a lot of cautions there and a lot of guys end up beating and banging on each other. I mean, the cars look like they’ve been to a race at Martinsville (Va.) because it’s a short road course. Save that car for the last 20 laps because that’s the critical time. Do what you have to do to get through the first 90 laps, but those last 20 are the ones when you really have to go, and you need your car to be in one piece to make it happen.”
You’ve won seven road course races altogether – two at Sonoma and five at The Glen. Does success at one venue transfer to the other?
“The two tracks, while both road courses, are still pretty different. At Watkins Glen you don’t have to finesse the throttle near as much as you do at Sonoma. When you get the car turned, you can get in the gas and then stay in the gas. Watkins Glen is much faster than Sonoma. I think there are the same amounts of passing opportunities, but because of the speeds that you’re able to run at The Glen, brakes become a much bigger factor than I think they are at Sonoma. It’s pretty much a horsepower track. It just happens to be in the form of a road course. Sonoma has a lot less grip in the racetrack. You have to really be careful with the throttle there, and that puts more of the race in the driver’s hands. If anything, Sonoma is probably more technical than Watkins Glen because there’s hardly any time where you get a chance to rest. You’re always either shifting or accelerating or braking or turning or doing something. At Watkins Glen, at least on the frontstretch and on the backstretch, there are three straightaways where you get a little bit of time to take a break. Watkins Glen seems to be more in the crew’s hands and the engine builder’s hands. Obviously, there’s still a job that I need to do in the racecar, but I’m relying on the equipment and the crew a lot more at Watkins Glen.”
With all those wins, do you feel you have a better opportunity to win on a road course than you do at some of the oval tracks?
“It’s definitely a place I feel like we’ve got the potential to win, even before we make a single lap. We seem to have taken to the road racing side of it fairly well and just have had good luck with it. I don’t know that there’s a secret to it, necessarily. I think a lot of it is that when we get to a road course, we look forward to being there. There are some drivers that don’t look forward to the road course races and we’re one of those teams that actually look forward to it. We like the change in pace and we get to do something different for a weekend. That’s something we always look forward to and it kind of gets us boosted up for the weekend.”
Because road course racing is such a different discipline, how do you approach it?
“I’ve just always liked it. I won a national championship racing go-karts on road courses, so the concept of what it took to win races on road courses wasn’t totally unknown to me, but driving cars with suspension, and definitely driving cars that you had to shift, that’s something that came relatively easy to me, and still comes easy to me as far as knowing how to synchronize the gears without having to use the help of the clutch. Even in the sports cars that I’ve driven with guys who have driven road courses all their life, I’ve gotten out of the car and the crew has torn the gearboxes apart and said that the dog rings in my transmission look better than when those guys are done with a transmission. There’s just something about the shifting side of it that’s been really natural to me, and it’s fun. I like having a different discipline to race on. I like having the opportunity to do something twice a year that we don’t get a shot at doing very often. I take the same amount of pride that someone like Ron Fellows or Scott Pruett does when they come into a road course race. I take that same pride in running well that they do in these cars. I don’t look at it from the standpoint that it’s a negative weekend. I look at it as a positive, that it’s something we enjoy and I feel like that gives us a leg up on most of the guys we race with at these tracks.”
How much do you look forward to racing on the road courses?
“I love the two road courses. It’s nice because it kind of breaks up the monotony of the season. We do the same thing every week and it’s nice to have two road course races thrown in the mix that give us a chance to do something a little bit off-center for all of us. It’s kind of like the ‘Prelude’ with no dirt added, unless you drive off, which a lot of us do. We still get a dirt aspect in it, I guess.”
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