Early returns favorable
Stewart-Haas thriving so far in switch to Ford
HAMPTON, Ga. — So much for a transition period at Stewart-Haas Racing.
The NASCAR team hasn’t slowed down since switching the manufacturer for its four-car stable from Chevrolet to Ford entering this year. Kurt Busch captured the season-opening Daytona 500 last weekend, and Kevin Harvick followed by earning the pole for today’s Monster Energy Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
“Hopefully this is the start of something great,” Harvick said.
There was plenty of speculation about how the change would go, especially for a driver such as Harvick, who had a long relationship with Chevrolet. Turns out, he had no trouble getting back up to speed.
“It’s fun to open Pandora’s box,” Harvick said. “You have to turn every leaf over and look at everything in your company. Everything is different from top to bottom. But one thing that stayed consistent was very good people. It’s been fun to see a group of people come together and try to make things better. It’s a major undertaking to do what we did.”
Busch, who will start 13th today, is still savoring the high from his Daytona victory. It may take a while to come down.
“You take it all in, you absorb it,” Busch said. “Years ago, when I won the (2004 season) championship, you look at it and you think, ‘Aw, man, this is a lot that goes along with it.’ And maybe I didn’t soak it all in. This time around, my phone is still 400 texts deep. I can’t get caught up.”
While Stewart-Haas Racing is showing early dominance, seven-time Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson shouldn’t be overlooked. The Hendrick Motorsports driver has won the past two editions of this race, though he will start 18th today.
“It’s been a great track for me,” Johnson said. “The last two races we won here, we didn’t really get ourselves situated until late in the going. … Just because you have a slow Friday or a slow start to the race, I don’t think you can count anybody out. We have a lot of chances to work on the car and make big stuff happen here, which is really neat.”
Ryan Newman showed signs of bouncing back from a disappointing 2016 season by qualifying for the outside of the front row, next to Harvick. While saying the No. 31 team still had a long way to go, Newman’s fast lap was a huge boost for his crew’s morale after he failed to qualify for the Chase last year.
“It’s a baby step,” Newman said. “But it’s huge. You can see the emotions of the guys in the garage. That’s something I didn’t see for a while last year. Even (last week at) Daytona, we were not anyone that people were talking about. We were there. We had a competitive car. But we were never on anyone’s one hand of who was going to win the race.”
This will be the Cup Series’ second test of the three-stage format intended to add more drama and excitement to the racing. The first two stages are 85 laps apiece, while the final stage will cover 155 laps if the race goes the scheduled 325-lap distance.
The new format didn’t have much impact in the crash-filled Daytona 500. Contenders such as Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. were wiped out by wrecks, and there were lengthy redflag delays that slowed the action in the restrictor-plate event, so this could be the first true test of how well the new system works.
Chase Elliott had a shot at winning at Daytona, only to run out of gas with just miles to go. He would love to earn his first Cup victory at what is essentially his home track.
“You learn through this stuff and just try to figure out what you could’ve differently,” said the 21-yearold Georgia native, who will start from the inside of the sixth row for Hendrick Motorsports. “From a performance side, I thought we did a good job. We were close, just not close enough.”
Elliott is in just his second full season of Cup competition — he was the series’ top rookie in 2016 — but is eager to get an elusive victory after 17 top-10 finishes a year ago, including 10 in the top five.
On the other end of the age spectrum is 58-yearold Derrike Cope, who will make his first Cup Series appearance in nearly eight years. The 1990 Daytona 500 champion is racing the No. 55 car for low-budget Premium Motorsports, the start of what he hopes will be at least a limited schedule this season.
Cope failed to pass inspection in time to go through qualifying Friday, along with four other cars, but no one had to worry about being sent home; there were only 39 entries for the 40-car field.
The last Cup race for Cope — whose other win in the series was also in 1990, at Dover International Speedway — was a start-and-park effort at Martinsville Speedway on March 29, 2009. He has 32 top-10 finishes in more than 400 races across four decades.
One thing that is old today will soon be new again.
This is the final race on the aging asphalt at Atlanta Motor Speedway. The track will get a new surface before the 2018 race, though much to the chagrin of drivers such as Johnson, who relished the chance to wrestle with his car on a high-speed track that is especially hard on tires.
“This track is so fun and so interesting and so challenging,” said Johnson, whose 80 career victories include five wins at AMS. “I hate that it’s our last run on this asphalt.”
“It’s fun to open Pandora’s box. ... Everything is different from top to bottom. But one thing that stayed consistent was very good people.”
– KEVIN HARVICK