After Harvick's title, things may only get better for Stewart-Haas
MIAMI, Fla. – As Kevin Harvick took the checkered flag for his first Sprint Cup Series championship on Sunday night, Stewart-Haas Racing became the only team in the Sprint Cup Series to field three Cup champions.
With the addition of Harvick and Kurt Busch, the 2004 champion, to the SHR lineup in 2014, there were numerous questions about how the newly-expanded four-car team would be compatible with each other. If outright dysfunction and struggles for all four drivers seemed like the worst-case scenario, a Cup title was the best case.
"Do you think we're crazy now?" SHR co-owner Tony Stewart rhetorically asked when the myriad of preseason possibilities was brought up Sunday night.
"Don't underestimate why we think the way we think is the moral to the story," Stewart said. "You guys are pretty smart, but we're smarter."
And even now, it's possible to underestimate Stewart-Haas. While the team was celebrating its second title, this was far from an A+ season for SHR and its teams. Improvement is a scary thought for the rest of the field.
While Harvick won five races and might have been the fastest car throughout the entire season, outside of what happened in August at a sprint car track in upstate New York, Stewart, a three-time champion, flat struggled this season. Not only did he break a streak of 15 straight seasons with a win in 2014, he had just three top-fives and seven top-10s, by far the lowest total of his career.
Busch won at Martinsville and showed flashes of the speed that Harvick did. However, he had 10 finishes of 30th or worse. The inconsistency necessitated a crew swap at the end of the year. Tony Gibson, Danica Patrick's crew chief at the start of 2014, moved over with the rest of the No. 10 team to crew for Busch. Daniel Knost, who started the season with Busch, took the No. 41 team over to Patrick.
In the final three races of the year, Busch qualified for each race in the top 10 and finished no lower than 11th. He started Sunday's season finale in second.
"I felt like we put down a really great lap and to do it with Tony Gibson and this new group of guys in our third race together is great," Busch said after qualifying Friday. "It shows all the signs are pointed in the right direction for next season.”
Stewart told the Associated Press that he's not done winning championships. With the new rules package taking away downforce from the cars and his continued recovery from the broken leg he suffered in August 2013, it's reasonable to expect he'll win a race and make the Chase. The same goes for Busch if he and Gibson can keep the speed they found at the beginning of the season and turn it into consistency.
The expected bouncebacks beg the question; is Stewart-Haas the best-positioned four-car team in the Sprint Cup Series over the next few seasons?
While Hendrick Motorsports may boast more championships (10) than SHR thanks to Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, two different SHR teams have won titles over the last five seasons. Joe Gibbs Racing has just one title-winning driver on its roster in Matt Kenseth, but it has the deepest roster of drivers in the series with the addition of Carl Edwards in 2015.
But, as we've seen with Stewart-Haas, teams can experience growing pains when expanding an operation. JGR is moving from three cars to four next season and doesn't have the access to the amount of data the Hendrick and Stewart-Haas cars do.
In his post-race press conference, Harvick talked glowingly of the way Hendrick and SHR (which gets its chassis and engines from HMS) worked together, saying he's never seen anything like it.
"It's like nobody questions anything about, we're sharing this or we're talking about that, so that part has been pretty awesome," Harvick said.
If you're ranking the three teams, you can make a compelling case for any of the six possible orders. Yeah, SHR may ultimately be an extension of an eight-car Hendrick operation, but don't be surprised if it gets another championship or two before HMS does.
"I think [competition director] Greg Zipadelli does a great job of managing people, and I think‑‑ racing is kind of a creative sport," SHR co-owner Gene Haas said. "If you clamp down on people, you don't get what you want. We kind of let people go in their own direction. I'm really amazed at how well Kevin and Rodney have done, and we will keep tweaking things until we get other teams to do better. But it's more of kind of a recipe of the way we do things that's different than every other race team.
"You win a championship once, maybe you call it a fluke, but if you do it the second time, I think we've got something. I couldn't put my finger on it, but there's something there that works. And whatever it is, I think Rodney and Kevin have alluded to it, just being brand‑new guys here that it's an easy place to work. Things get done, people like working with each other, and for the most part, I think we're a very productive group at Stewart‑Haas Racing."
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
