iNSIDE SCOOP: Just What the Doctor Ordered

There was not a happier man on the planet Sunday than Tony Stewart.

For good reason.

After spending 12 races in NASCAR also-ran hell, Stewart finally came up with the performance he needed to set the ship back on an even keel, and it came at what he considered to be one of his worst tracks.

He ran down leader Juan Pablo Montoya in the closing laps, leading the final three for his 48th career victory and first in nearly a calendar year. It was bigger than that.

Uncharacteristically, Stewart had been…just bad through the first 12 races, and when he was kind of sporty, something happened. At California, he was making a move on the final restart that might have seen him log a top-five finish early, but we all know what happened then.

Joey Logano ran him down to the apron, killing his momentum, and by the time he got back to it, he was in the middle of the pack. He finished 18th, parked near Logano on pit road, ran over and got into a bit of pitter-pat with Logano and his crew and gave one of the classic post-combat interviews of the past several years to Steve Byrnes.

He was good at Martinsville, but finished badly. And that has been the usual M.O. for the three-time champion this year, as he struggles to keep three cars on the track and in the money. Sponsorship has been elusive for all three cars, at least in terms of full-season money, and managing the development of DanicaMania takes a toll all its own.

But winning is a cure for most any ill, and winning at Dover, when he expected to run 18th or something, adds to the total feeling.

Smoke is a momentum guy. Look no further than the drive to the 2011 title for evidence of that. This doesn’t mean that Smoke is going to rip off five victories in 10 races and just dominate, but it is a harbinger that the winds are changing in Kannapolis.

The fact that he was able, at the end of the day, to hit the right strategy at the right time and had the right line to take the lead, it was a trifecta that had been sorely missing for the 14 car so far this year. It had been so bad that rumors were starting to circulate about the future of Stewart’s hand-picked crew chief Steve Addington. That just ticked Stewart off. 

But, on Sunday, sitting in the media center at Dover as the race winner, he talked about the process that it has taken to get from middle of the pack to Victory Lane. 

“The hard thing in this business and especially when you're struggling, it's hard    the further off base you are, the harder it is to sit there and pinpoint a problem,” he said. “It can be numerous problems, and it can be one problem.  But the hard part is when you're far enough off base, it's hard to break it down and diagnose those problems. 

“It literally is a process, at least in my opinion, my view. It's a process of elimination.  You eliminate a variable at a time until you finally narrow it down to a group of possibilities of what the problem is, and that's something that this group has done and been doing and we are still in the process of doing. 

“But you know, you can have that mindset of that's what has to happen but you have to have people that have the mindset to also execute that, and that's what we've got.  We've got people that are very dedicated to making sure that no matter how bad it gets that they keep their heads focused in the same direction.”

After a top-10 at Charlotte and Sunday’s victory, Stewart is aware that he’s turned a corner with his car.

“I think last week was a step in the right direction, and a bigger step than I possibly could have imagined.  This week is a step in the right direction.  Matt and Ryan had an awesome day on Friday, qualified well and that gives us hope.  Today gives us hope.”

When you’re Tony Stewart, hope is the first step. Performance, victories and titles come next.