Stenhouse, Roush on the right track
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — When Ricky Stenhouse Jr. first made the switch from sprint cars to stock cars, he wrecked an awful lot of Jack Roush’s inventory.
It got so bad, Roush had to sit Stenhouse down in an attempt to rein him in a little bit.
The patience the team owner showed Stenhouse while rebuilding his organization — once among the top in NASCAR — paid off late Saturday night when Stenhouse won for the second time this season. His victory at Daytona International Speedway was his second in two months. He went 155 Cup Series races before getting to victory lane the first time.
Roush wasn’t at Daytona to celebrate with Stenhouse after the Coke Zero 400, though. He took the holiday weekend off and was on vacation with his granddaughter.
“We believe we’re on the right track, and you always want more, but we’re pretty excited about the direction we’re headed and that’s a testament to Jack Roush and what he’s set up,” Roush Fenway Racing president Steve Newmark said.
“Jack is on vacation taking his granddaughter out to see Mount Rushmore, and it’s something we’ve encouraged him to do because what Jack has done over the last year is really empowered a group of individuals to try to run the company on a day-today basis. This is probably Jack’s proudest moment because this
was a race that he wasn’t at, and we were still able to implement everything that he’s taught us and go out there and get him in victory lane.”
There’s no denying that Stenhouse, who turns 30 in October, has been an integral part of Roush’s turnaround. He wasn’t promoted to NASCAR’s top circuit on a fulltime basis until 2013, after he won consecutive Xfinity Series championships.
The promotion was rocky for a while, in part because of Stenhouse’s natural drive to push too hard, and in part because Roush was on a rapid road toward mediocrity. The team had gone from five Cup Series cars in its heyday and a monster lineup that included Greg Biffle, Kurt Busch, Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth to just a two-car team this year.
As the Roush group continued to rebuild, Stenhouse figured out his strengths. It’s clear that one of them, said Stewart-Haas Racing driver Clint Bowyer — who finished second Saturday night — is racing on restrictor-plate tracks. Stenhouse’s first victory was in May at Talladega Superspeedway.
“He does a good job of blocking. He’s learned a lot. He’s become a good plate racer,” Bowyer said. “I remember when he came in, he was a little bit chaotic, but he’s not now. He’s got it figured out, and he’s won two of them.”
Stenhouse laughed at Bowyer’s use of the word “chaotic” and chalked it up to coming through the ranks racing sprint cars on dirt tracks. But actually having a car that can contend has been a significant part of the growing process.
“I think us dirt guys, we drive the car really hard,” Stenhouse said. “I think a lot of the times as a race car driver you try to take the car and put it on your back. It’s tough to do in the Cup Series. Everything has got to align right, and I think when I came into the Cup Series, I almost thought we were going to win our first race at Kansas that year and get our first win out of the way.”
Instead, Stenhouse acknowledged, he and his team “really kind of struggled after that” because “everybody was just trying to do more than we were capable of for a long time.”
Stenhouse has a career-high seven top-10 finishes already this season, so now that the rebuild has turned an obvious corner, it’s up to him to continue delivering on the track — or tracks, more appropriately. He has shown restrictor-plate success but must prove he can win across the spectrum.
“I feel like our next accomplishments that we can do on the race track are probably short-track wins,” he said. “We’re still working on our mile-and-a-half program. We don’t feel like we’re capable of winning on a mile-and-a-half. We feel like we can run top 10 and get top-10 finishes, but we’re not ready to go out and win those races yet.
“But that’s something that we’re working toward, trying to get a plan together for the playoffs so that we can go out and compete at those. But I feel really good about the short tracks.”