Optimism Rampant in NASCAR

The annual Sprint NASCAR Media Tour hosted by Charlotte Motor Speedway is a time for all NASCAR teams to dream big, confident that the coming season will produce victories, momentum and performance, hopefully culminating in a championship season.

It only turns out that way for one of them, but can you blame the teams for daring to dream?

Stewart-Haas Racing knows what it’s like to dream big and come through in the clutch. They, led by three-time champion Tony Stewart, were the big winners last year. Roush-Fenway Racing, on the other hand, has a chip on their shoulder because they fell one point and four victories short of winning it themselves.

Tony Stewart, co-owner of SHR, was calm and unflustered on Monday, dealing with the questions about 2012 and reliving his 2011 run to the title. Of course, it helped that the media swarmed over new driver Danica Patrick, too.

Over at Roush, there was a lot of focus on that missing point that cost Carl Edwards the crown at Homestead. “I can tell you this,” Roush GM Robbie Reiser said. “We are going to find that point this year.”

Much interest was generated by the Ford bunch when they rolled out the working version of the 2013 Fusion. It no longer looks like an angular version of the street car it is built on: it IS the street car it’s built on,

with exceptions for the COT chassis and other measurements NASCAR requires. It looks like a Ford, rather than a stock car with a couple brand identifiers on the grille and greenhouse.

“I think it looks really good,” said Leonard Wood, one of the legendary Wood Brothers. “It looks like a Ford, and that’s the way I like it.”

There hasn’t been this much buzz for a new car since Dodge introduced the Charger back in 2000. The race car, according to Ford officials, was designed by the same production team that built the road car, and that is a bit of a departure from the norm.

While there was a lot of buzz around the Ford camp, Earnhardt Ganassi Racing took a different tack. It was almost grim when team owner Chip Ganassi termed his team’s performance in 2011 “pathetic,” and promised that the big changes made at the end of last season would pay off—or the changes would happen again.

Ganassi replaced long-time team stalwarts Steve Hmiel and Tony Glover with new personnel, added a new crew chief and made other moves during the offseason in an effort to improve on 21st- and 27th-place finishes in the points.

There’s still a bunch to see and do on the Tour, which ends later today. Stay tuned to the blog on www.onmc.com, and on Facebook and Twitter!