Tony Stewart's final grind has been just that ... but it's working

ByBOB POCKRASS
August 13, 2016, 4:00 PM

— -- Tony Stewart vowed to enjoy his final Sprint Cup season, and running well over the last eight races has helped.

But Stewart also found, and not to his surprise, what Jeff Gordon realized during his final full season a year ago: NASCAR Sprint Cup racing is just too intense and too demanding to have fun throughout the experience.

It's work now and retirement when it's over. Stewart will have to thrive and revel in the pressure of Sprint Cup racing for 14 more weeks before he hangs up his Sprint Cup driver suit.

"It is a tradeoff," says the three-time Sprint Cup champion. "It's one of the most competitive forms of motorsports in the world right now, and because it is, is why it's not necessarily fun all the time.

"It's work and it's a lot of stress and it's a lot of hours. I spend more time looking at data than I ever have."

At least the work appears be paying off. Stewart has four top-5 finishes in his last five races and six top-10 finishes in his last eight. His last two events, fifth-place runs at Pocono and Watkins Glen, were races where it could easily be argued he had more of a 10th-place car than a fifth-place car, but worked strategically to get the higher finish.

It also has some looking at Stewart as the guy who won the 2011 Sprint Cup title with an incredible Chase, where he won five of the final 10 races.

"I'm not sure we're ready to rip off five wins in 10 races, but the confidence that we have and the demeanor of everybody on the team is definitely the same right now [as in 2011]," Stewart said.

Stewart hasn't led enough laps yet to be considered a full-bore championship contender. He led 22 laps at Sonoma, but those laps and one lap at Daytona are all he has led in the last 11 races. That's not necessarily championship-caliber performance, but it is a performance that would keep a driver in the championship hunt likely until at least the third round.

"I still think we're a little bit short of where we need to be," Stewart said prior to the race at Watkins Glen last week. "We're gaining on it. We have got to get to where [teammate] Kevin [Harvick] is to have a shot at it. ... Whether we are going to be a championship contender or not, I want to be running good each week.

"We've got that on our side. Everybody is relaxed and everybody is having fun. That's what I want this last year."

Stewart hasn't really thought about the Chase yet for two reasons -- four races still remain (starting with the Aug. 20 race at Bristol), and he doesn't see the use of filling his mind with strategy for his first appearance in an elimination Chase.

"[The format] doesn't matter - if you go out there and win races, the rest of it takes care of itself -- the same as it did 18 years ago when I came into this series," Stewart said.

In other words, Stewart will gear up toward his last Chase the same way he has in the past -- he will focus on getting the best finish possible and continue to do things his way. That will include going off to races at dirt tracks and other facilities holding events where his sprint-car teams or the sprint-car series he owns are competing.

Stewart points to finishing second at New Hampshire last month after returning from Eldora Speedway in the wee hours of the morning as a sign he can continue the schedule that leaves crew chief Mike Bugarewicz to handle figuring out the setup and Stewart available by text while having fun somewhere else.

"Being able to do go do those things, if we were having a bad weekend, it got my mind off it, it helped keep me level," Stewart said. "Instead of sitting in the motorhome, and sitting there trying to get a Ouija board out and trying to figure out the magic setup was for the next day, I would go somewhere else and get the mind off of it.

"The best thing I can do is go keep myself busy. When I can do that, it seems to work better for me. ... It's not the sleep I need. It's the clear mind I need. I can stay up like a rockstar still and I'm not sure the rest of these kids can."

Keeping that clear mind also requires Stewart to not focus on his last race at the tracks the remainder of the season. He knows he will return at least as an owner, so it's not like he won't drive through the tunnel in the future.

"I try to downplay it in my mind," Stewart said. "I want to focus on what I'm doing for the weekend. The nostalgia stuff, you think about it after the event is over.

"After Indy [last month], I thought about what Indy meant. I didn't think about it all weekend. I thought about what I could do to win the race. You stick to your guns with what you do. You stay in race mode. When the weekend is over and the race mode is over, then you think about all the other things."

Like what he needs to do to prepare for the Chase...

"[We're] still just trying to find a little more speed, and we just keep building on what we've been building on up until this point -- I don't think we're looking for big magic right now," Stewart said. "It's just to keep the same progress going and keep going down that path and making it better and better.

"I sleep a lot better during the weekends. There's been nights before the race that I felt like we were a 15th-place car and that we were going to struggle, and then we found a way to pull something out of it at the end. And that's what it takes."