KANNAPOLIS, N.C. (Sept. 21, 2011) – Almost perfection. That’s how Ryan Newman and his No. 39 Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR) team would describe their dominating performance at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon just 10 weeks ago.
For the South Bend, Ind., native and everyone else at SHR, there’s no doubt it was a magical weekend at the track known as The Magic Mile. After earning the pole position in qualifying on Friday afternoon, Newman went wire to wire – driving from his No. 1 starting spot to victory lane – for his 15th Sprint Cup win, his third at New Hampshire and his first in 2011.
The win, which helped secure Newman a spot in this year’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Championship, served notice to his competitors in the garage that Newman and his No. 39 Haas Automation team would be both determined and daring as they compete and contend for the 2011 title.
During that July race, crew chief Tony Gibson made a gutsy call to keep Newman’s superfast No. 39 Chevrolet out front rather than pit under caution. Only once during the 301-lap race did Gibson call for a four-tire change. In the end, Newman pitted for the final time on lap 217, and Gibson spent the remaining 84 laps urging his driver to save fuel at every opportunity.
The bold call paid off and landed Newman & Company in victory lane for the first time in 47 races. Newman led six times for 119 laps, and it was just the fourth time in his 10-year career that he had won from the pole position.
The win was all part of a banner and history-making weekend for SHR. Newman and teammate-team owner Tony Stewart started 1-2 and finished 1-2. The last time a team started 1-2 and finished 1-2 was Hendrick Motorsports in the 1989 Daytona 500. However, the last time a team started 1-2 and finished 1-2 with the same drivers in the same order was back on April 7, 1957, at North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway with DePaolo Engineering. There, Fireball Roberts won from the pole while teammate Paul Goldsmith started second and finished second.
Now, as the Sprint Cup Series makes its return to New Hampshire Motor Speedway this weekend for the second race in the Chase, the No. 39 team has set as its goal a return visit to the 1.058-mile flat track’s victory lane.
After a solid eighth-place effort in the Chase’s first race at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Ill., Newman is now seventh in the standings, but tied with sixth-place Brad Keselowski, 14 points arrears leader Kevin Harvick. Keselowski gets the sixth spot because he has three wins this season, compared to Newman’s one trip to victory lane.
Perhaps there’s no better racetrack for Newman to continue his ascent in the point standings than New Hampshire. In 19 starts at Loudon, he has three wins (September 2002 and 2005, July 2011), six top-five finishes and 13 top-10s.
And not only is the track the site of Newman’s most recent Sprint Cup win, statistically speaking, it is one of his best tracks in the 10-race Chase.
In fact, the Magic Mile ranks second among the 10 venues in both average start and average finish for the Purdue University engineering graduate. Newman, with five poles in 19 starts at New Hampshire, has an average starting position of 8.5. His average finish is 12.4, just slightly bettered by his 10.9 average finish at Dover (Del.) International Speedway.
For Newman and his Gibson-led race team, the key over these final nine races is the same consistency which the team has demonstrated throughout the course of the 2011 season – the same consistency that helped the team earn a berth in the Chase. In 27 races, Newman has one win, two poles, eight top-five and 14 top-10 finishes. He has completed 99.3 percent of the laps run thus far this season and has not posted a DNF (did not finish).
With two consecutive top-10s – both eighth-place efforts at Chicagoland and Richmond (Va.) International Raceway – and four top-10s in the last five races, Newman and the No. 39 Chevrolet appear headed in the right direction.
And with a return trip to New Hampshire’s Magic Mile on tap for this weekend, don’t be surprised if Newman & Company has something up its proverbial sleeve to relive and repeat that magical moment from July in hopes of continuing its march up the Sprint Cup standings toward another history-making milestone – Newman’s first Sprint Cup Series championship.