Pressure? What Pressure?

Every pro athlete knows a little something about pressure.

 

There’s the pressure to perform, to do wondrous things on the court of choice, lead your team to victory, not screw it up.

 

In basketball, baseball and hockey, there are seven-game final series where, if you lose one or even two games, all is not lost.

 

That’s not the case in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

 

Take Denny Hamlin, for instance. A 31^st-place run at Chicagoland put him in go-or-go-home territory. A 29^th at New Hampshire put him in the Chase basement, perhaps to stay.

 

After Sunday’s race at New Hampshire, Hamlin sits 66 points in arrears of Stewart, the leader. That’s a ton of points, to say the least. To make it up, there will have to be a conflagration of cosmic proportions among the top 11 or a massive outbreak of points-chopping penalties.

 

That’s not going to happen, not en masse. Hamlin, two weeks into the most important 10-week stretch in his area of expertise, will spend the remaining eight weeks working for 2012. Whether that entails a realignment of his team or other similar changes remains to be seen, but change will happen for ’12. Count on that.

 

This was a team that took a lead into the final race of the season in 2010 and ended up losing to Jimmie Johnson. One race away from being Denny Hamlin, NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion, not just Denny Hamlin, driver of the No. 11 FedEx Toyota.

 

Ryan Newman is, all of a sudden, near the bottom of the pack after just two races. He won the pole for the Sylvania 300 and ran in the top 10 or 15 all day long until a flat tire a few laps from the end killed his chances and put him 26^th in the rundown.

 

He’s 34 points out of the lead, held by his teammate, and that’s a bunch of points to make up, but it’s at least do-able without divine intervention or rampant lawlessness on the part of championship-caliber crew chiefs.

 

Such swings of fortune are not unusual in NASCAR’s run to the roses, but rarely do they happen so quickly and so…finally, in the case of Hamlin.

 

Stewart says that, while the first two weeks have gone as well as they can for him and his team, it can swing the other way just as quickly.

 

“The reality of it is you look at guys that are in the back half of the Chase right now, they're guys that a lot of people expected to be in the top five, top three in the points right now,” he said. “It shows that one or two bad days can put you in a bad spot pretty quick.

 

“I'm proud of our group.  I'm confident that we've got a group of guys that are very, very focused right now.  Like we said, the cars don't know anything about momentum, but the people do.  This is the perfect scenario to go into these last eight weeks, for sure.”

 

In other words, Stewart knows that of which he speaks. In the first 26 races of the season, he was competitive early, and again in the last two races before the Chase field was decided. In between, however, he couldn’t find a fast car or a good break with a miner’s helmet and GPS.

 

“It was one of those where we kind of had no idea,” said crew chief Darian Grubb. “We had a really good start to the year, had good race cars, fast race cars, chances to win, strategies to win, got beat over and over and over.  It beat us down. 

 

“Middle of the year we couldn't hit on anything that made it better.  Rode the same, didn't have feedback or anything that was positive.  Everything was just kind of there.

 

“The last few weeks we started getting better.  I think it was the same time at Michigan that Tony said we weren't Chase contenders even if we made the Chase.  I think everybody started taking an extra load, working harder, getting faster.”

 

Sometimes that is all it takes. When Stewart said that he didn’t deserve a spot in the Chase, even if he made it in, that put some steel in the spines of guys like car chief Jeff Meendering, tire changer Ira Jo Hussey, and Grubb.

 

That’s pressure, when your team owner calls you out on national TV, no matter that he was calling himself out as well.

 

Grubb and his guys responded like champions. Pressure does funny things to people. In some, it makes them shine. In others, they freeze solid. Champions endure it, overcome it, turn it to good.

 

Stewart couldn’t put a time or date on when the switch was flipped, but flip it did.

 

“When you talk about momentum, that race car doesn't know anything about momentum.  It knows what you put in it, it knows how we drive it. It doesn't know stats, it doesn't know anything other than just what's put in it.

 

“Momentum deals with people.  It's not just these first two races of the Chase, it was the two weeks leading before it, too.  We haven't finished outside the top seven now in the last four weeks.  That's huge for us.  It's huge for our guys.”

 

The race at Michigan, where Stewart declared his team not deserving of the Chase, was a trigger, he said. It all began to change after that.

 

“It happened in a week,” he said. “We went from five laps down at Bristol to running third at Atlanta the next week.  No, you don't see it coming.  It's not like we say, ‘OK, this is what happened, this is what's wrong, this is what you have to do to fix it.’

 

“There's been races where we just missed it, couldn't get it happy, get the car happy.  There's been races where we've been a top-five, top-three car or winning car, something stupid happened, you finish 15th or 20th, you leave going, ‘we missed an opportunity.’

 

He hasn’t missed so far in the Chase, even with all the pressure he’s under as the point leader and having to defend it.

 

“The potential's been there all year,” he said. “You wonder when the bad luck string is going to stop.  You hope, like I said, it happens another eight weeks now.  We hope we're through it and we can keep clicking off top fives, 10s.  If we could get a couple more wins, that would be awesome.

 

“The thing about this sport is things change week to week.  The one thing I think our organization is really good at is taking what we're doing day to day.  I mean, we don't lose sight of where we're at today worrying about two weeks down the road.  We focus one day at a time.”