Prior to October’s race at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Grubb learned that his tenure as Tony Stewart’s crew chief would end after the season. Then, six races and three victories later, Grubb won an improbable NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship atop the pit box for the No. 14 Office Depot/Mobil 1 Chevrolet. A few days later, the move was confirmed. Grubb was out, Steve Addington was in as Stewart’s crew chief in 2012.

That draining sequence of events framed the highlight of Thursday’s traditional NASCAR NMPA Myers Brothers Awards Luncheon at the Bellagio – Grubb’s acceptance speech as champion crew chief.

With emotion in his voice, Grubb thanked Stewart for the opportunity – and his friendship. During the post-event media availability, Grubb explained his feelings from the roller-coaster ride.

“It’s just tough,” Grubb said. “It’s just awkward because we want to enjoy it, but we know things are changing. So we’re trying our best to enjoy the championship and everything we’ve earned and deserved and go from there.”

Stewart, who filled his expanding trophy case with four more awards on Thursday, continued a dream week. Enjoying the spoils as guest of honor during NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Champion’s Week, Stewart picked up the phone on Wednesday morning to speak with President Barack Obama – calling from Air Force One.

“It is a huge honor to get a call from the President of the United States,” Stewart said. “I was more nervous that I wasn’t going to be able to hear on the phone very well, being from Air Force One, but they got great service up there. He just congratulated us on a great season. … The First Lady was giving him updates from the track, so I was really proud that he was following our sport and cared enough to call yesterday.”

A number of postseason awards were given out during the luncheon, the last of which was the event’s namesake: the NMPA Myers Brothers Award. This year, the honor was given to former CEO of Pocono Raceway Dr. Joe Mattioli and his wife Rose.

Also announced today was the Wheaties Fuel Most Popular Driver Award, given to Dale Earnhardt Jr. for the ninth consecutive year.

At the event’s conclusion, the top-12 drivers hit The Strip for what has evolved into one of the most hotly anticipated events of Champion’s Week: the NASCAR Victory Lap. For the third consecutive year, thousands of fans lined The Strip to watch the top 12 roar down The Strip. Starting at Planet Hollywood and ending at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, celebratory burnouts smoked the closed streets of Las Vegas.

A large crowd also enjoyed a Q&A session with the top 12 at the popular NASCAR After The Lap, held at the Hard Rock. The tell-all format has gained mass appeal, as drivers show fans a more personal side.

Day 3 events ended with the presentation of the SiriusXM NASCAR Radio “Stewie Awards,” hosted by Tony Stewart, honoring the best moments of the 2011 season.

Here is the complete list of Thursday’s award winners from the NASCAR NMPA Myers Brothers Awards Luncheon:

• Myers Brothers Award: Drs. Joe and Rose Mattioli
• NASCAR Foundation Track of the Year Award: Michigan International Speedway
• Wheaties Fuel Most Popular Driver Award: Dale Earnhardt Jr.
• Buddy Shuman Award: Richard Childress
• NASCAR Marketing Achievement Award: Toyota
• Sunoco Rookie of the Year Award: Andy Lally
• Growth Energy American Ethanol Green Flag Restart: Matt Kenseth
• Coors Light Pole Award: Carl Edwards
• Mobil 1 Driver of the Year Award: Tony Stewart
• DIRECTV Crew Chief of the Year Award: Bob Osborne
• MOOG Chassis Part Problem Solver of the Year Award: Alan Gustafson
• O’Reilly Auto Parts Position Improvement Award: Tony Stewart
• Mechanix Wear Most Valuable Pit Crew Award: Roush Fenway Racing No.99
• Mahle Engine Builder of the Year Award: Roush Yates Engines No. 99 (Doug Yates)
• Goodyear Gatorback Belts & Hoses Fastest Lap Award: Kyle Busch
• Sunoco Diamond Performance Award: Tony Stewart
• Goodyear Tires Award: Tony Stewart
• Champion Sponsor Award: Office Depot and Mobil 1
• Champion Crew Chief: Darian Grubb

Only one event remains in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Champion’s Week schedule.

Friday, Dec. 3

2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Awards Ceremony: The big show starts at 6 p.m. (9 p.m. ET), crowning the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Tony Stewart and team Stewart-Haas Racing, and honoring the other drivers who finished in the top 10 in the final series standings. The star-studded entertainment lineup for the ceremony includes country music icon Reba as host, a performance by Grammy-award winning rocker Kid Rock, as well as performances by two recent additions: up-and-coming country artist Ella Mae Bowen and Broadway sensation Jersey Boys. SPEED, SIRIUS XM NASCAR Radio and MRN Radio will broadcast the event, live at 9 p.m. ET.

The Spartanburg, S.C., native is only the third crew chief Stewart has had during his 13-year Sprint Cup career, and it comes just a week after Stewart captured the 2011 Sprint Cup title.

“I know Steve well and I know how he goes about setting up a racecar,” said Stewart, who worked with Addington from 2005 through 2008 during his time at Joe Gibbs Racing. “My comfort level with him is already strong. He balances the technical part of our sport with the real-world experiences we get at the track, and that will allow for a smooth transition as we prepare to defend our title in 2012.”

Addington has served as crew chief for Bobby Labonte (2005), J.J. Yeley (2006-2007), Kyle Busch (2008-race No. 33 of 2009) and Kurt Busch (2010-2011) during his ongoing Sprint Cup career. Twelve wins were scored with Kyle Busch at Joe Gibbs Racing and four wins were notched with older brother Kurt during his most recent tenure at Penske Racing.

Prior to rising to the elite Sprint Cup ranks, Addington spent 15 seasons as a crew chief in the NASCAR Nationwide Series, 11 of which came with driver Jason Keller where the duo won 10 races, 11 poles and scored 69 top-five and 122 top-10 finishes.

“Tony and I are a lot alike and we’re able to push each other,” Addington said. “I saw how he worked when we were at Gibbs together and I’m not surprised at all at the success he’s created at Stewart-Haas Racing. He expects a lot and he knows a lot. His talent behind the wheel is obvious, but his ability to motivate and get everyone to believe that whatever goal they set is attainable is something every crew chief wants, and I plan to make the most of it.”

Addington has proven he can win with all kinds of drivers at all kinds of tracks. From the quiet and low-key drivers of Keller and Mike Bliss, whom Addington worked with in the Nationwide Series, to the competitive personalities of Kyle and Kurt Busch, Addington has steered his pilots to victory, and he’s done so at every conceivable type of racetrack – superspeedways, road courses, intermediates and short tracks.

“Steve has proven himself everywhere he’s been,” Stewart added. “Our expectation when we unload each weekend is to win, and that’s Steve’s expectation, too. Getting there is never easy, but we’ve both been around long enough to know what it takes to be successful.”

Addington replaces Darian Grubb, who served as Stewart’s crew chief since the inception of SHR in 2009.

“Darian was a very important part of the success we’ve had at Stewart-Haas Racing,” Stewart said. “I’m very proud of everything he helped accomplish, especially this year when we all rallied to win the championship. He’s a great person and I know he’ll continue to be successful in this sport.”

KERRY THARP

GENE HAAS:  It’s an awesome day.  It’s really hard to get to this point and kind of leaves you speechless.

Q.  This is a team that was struggling to be in the top 35 just a few years ago, and enter Tony and his people, and now you’ve got a Sprint Cup Series championship.  Can you talk a little about that transition and what it’s meant to you?

GENE HAAS:  Well, you know, I’ve been doing it for ten years, Sprint Cup Series.

It’s hard.  I think when you enter it, you have these expectations that you can run with the big dogs and that’s a lot harder to do than you think.

But like any organization, you really do have to pay your dues.  You have to spend your time – talked to an awful lot of people when we first started.  You know, he was very thoughtful about what he told me.  His words were, I don’t know why you want to get in this sport, but if you want to be in this sport, I tell you what, I’m going to help you lose as little money as possible.  That was his words of wisdom.  So he partnered up with us and we went forward from there.

In racing, things don’t always work.  There’s changes.  When we first started out, it wasn’t a great time to enter the sport because it was kind of somewhat in the height of its popularity, drivers were at a premium, most people in the garage don’t put a lot of faith in a new team, so you have to spend your time just earning their respect.

And even that doesn’t cut it.  So many teams fail.  People spend huge amounts of money to try to get to this point.  And we just kept plugging away.  I think we weren’t doing that well as you pointed out.  We had two cars – it’s tough when you’re in that bottom 35 range.

So you just make changes.  And you know, thanks to Chevrolet, and Tony was ready to go beyond being a driver, and so that’s how it was all born.

Q.  What did you think when your people said, we have this idea, we want Tony Stewart to own half and go from there.

GENE HAAS:  You know, Tony Stewart is a superstar, we knew that.  And I had, basically as we said, back at our shop, I had the jackstands and Tony Stewart was the driver of the car and he could do that.  Unfortunately you need a wheel man.  You could have the best equipment in the world but without a good wheel man, you really don’t have a whole lot.

Just seemed like an opportunity.  I thought Tony was a little crazy for doing it, but Tony is a little bit smarter than you think sometimes.  He obviously saw some potential in what we did.  He has a lot of great relationships.  Like we had a lot of great relationships with Hendrick, so we had good equipment.  Tony had good people.  And like everything else, I mean, you know, today proves all of that right.

KERRY THARP:  We are joined by championship crew chief Darian Grubb.  Darian, just a terrific run you guys had in the Chase, winning five of ten race, and I don’t think there’s been a better performance under clutch circumstances than it was by the 14 team here tonight.  Your thoughts about winning the championship.

DARIAN GRUBB:  Five out of ten, that’s pretty damn impressive, don’t you think.

KERRY THARP:  That’s .500, my friend.

DARIAN GRUBB:  It was just fun, honestly.  We had our ups and downs with Dover and Kansas and some of the others.  But the team rallying around when we had bad days and never giving up, and then Tony never giving up either.  And just what he’s done arriving a race car has been just extremely impressive to me.  He’s been the one to go three- and four-wide and everyone else is just scared and lifts.  I think he went out and earned this championship.

Q.  How does a guy who wins a championship pull five races out of ten – just everything you accomplished, find himself without a job at the end of the year?  The whole thing is just baffling.

DARIAN GRUBB:  It is to me, honestly.  I’m not sure what’s going to happen.  But I was told early in the Chase before Charlotte that next year I was not going to be here.  We just kept fighting and doing everything we had to do every week.  It did not change anything, what the outcome was going to be.  We fought as if we were going to fight to win this championship, and we did it, and now we’ll just see in this coming week how things change.

Q.  So again, have you had any conversations with anyone else since you were given that news, and obviously, so the door is still open to remain with the Stewart-Haas organization?

DARIAN GRUBB:  As far as the latter part, I’m not sure.  I had a lot of conversations with a lot of people, telling them, please give me the courtesy of waiting until tonight to see what we could accomplish.

And now that we have done that, I guess we’ll start talking, but we’ll do a little celebrating first.

Q.  Along that same line, do you have a mind-set, are you going to wait until after Thanksgiving?  Are you going to start talking tomorrow?  And what are your personal feelings?  Do you want to stay within the organization?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Originally I always wanted to stay within the organization.  That’s the reason I came here was to help build something special.  I think we have done that.  We made the Chase all three years and had a shot at winning the championship all three years, and now this year, being able to pull it off, we accomplished our goals and that’s what we wanted to do.

As far as time line, I’ll let you know later.  We are just going to plan to celebrate, talk, see what happens from there.

Q.  You said that Tony has been the one to go three and four wide while other people are scared and they lift.  He really drove that way all night it seemed tonight, and maybe the last five, six weeks, he’s been like that.  Did he turn it up to a level?  Had you seen him drive this way before?

DARIAN GRUBB:  He did it before the Chase even started, if you look back to Atlanta.  I think he was talking about how good we made the car there, and he drove from 20th to third, and we didn’t tell him until after the race, we didn’t make a single change to the car the last three stops, just four tires and go.  He went out there and did that, drove from 20 to third and I think that’s one of those true moments that we realized that we can do it.

The cars are good, everyone behind him at Stewart-Haas Racing is incredible.  We had really strong people behind us and we all go out there and put all of the things we have worked on all year, all three years, that’s in our arsenal, Matt, all of those guys they have built speed in these cars; and the Hendrick chassis and engine has been really good, but what we do to it after we get it is even better.  So we are really looking forward to thanking everybody, celebrating and enjoying it.

Q.  What did you feel was the key for your organization to come back after the performances at Dover and Kansas?  And then, also, can you talk about what – do you know exactly what happened to cause the damage at the start of the race to the grill?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Yeah, as far as the damage at the start of the race, we are not really sure.  I know the 22 lost transmission and driveshafts.  So evidently some piece of that, he was in front of there, went in and just went through the grill and luckily did not get the radiator.  There was no debris or anything in the duct work, but Jeff and the guys did a really good job putting it back together.

And the next restart, Tony hit the double zero just because of how aggressive he was being, the double zero checked up and ripped the left side of the nose open.  So he had to come in the next stop there and fix that after he got back into the top 20 again.

So just keeping fighting with all of those small things, it was just a true team effort all night to be able to fight our way back up through there — inaudible — seeing him every day on the racetrack, that’s what I get to deal with on the radio, too.  That’s the true Tony everybody knows and loves and we all know he can go out there and be a champion and he did that for the third time tonight.

Q.  There were times this season where Tony was obviously frustrated with the way he ran, with the way the car ran, and then these last couple of week, he was just dynamite and I think Jenna said during the race, how come he doesn’t drive like this all the time.

DARIAN GRUBB:  Everybody has that in them at some point.  I was frustrated many times this year, as well.  You have to dig down deep and fight.  If you are going to do this 38 weeks a year, you’d better be able to take the lows and highs and not get too upset, and just keep a nice even keel and just keep fighting against what you are fighting against.  Luckily this week we got to where we were just fighting against the 99 and beat all 42 competitors to the win and guaranteed that championship.

Q.  You said at New Hampshire after you had won two out of two there, that the moment back in August at Michigan where Tony said, it doesn’t matter whether we make the Chase or not, lit a fire and people re-doubled their efforts.  Looking back on that now with the way y’all have performed, might that sort of slap at the team, might that have been the key moment that detonated all of this?  And how would you describe your emotions at the time?  Mad at him?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Honestly I’m not sure.  About half the team took that as disappointment and half of them took it as just being mad.  Because we do fight hard every week.  We try to build winning race cars.  It’s a tough competition out there now and you are not going to have a winning car every week and it’s very frustrating to all of us.

After the middle of the season, we just kept having things stack up against us and we didn’t have those good weeks.  It got the best of all of us.  We all had just sour attitudes and that was probably the time whether we just – we didn’t really dig in any harder but it just turned the attitude around.  So there’s no reason for us to have this sour attitude and let’s just keep doing what we know we can do and get fast race cars on the racetrack under Tony and get better and that’s what we did.

Q.  Do you think that one little media moment was the trigger moment?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Could be.  There’s multiple ones that’s happened behind closed doors, too, at the shop.  I can’t say there’s any one moment but that’s about the time frame where everybody just started turning things around if you look at what the 39 team did and the 14 team as well.  We are just a strong organization and everyone enjoys what they do for a living and that’s why we are here.

Q.  I apologize for the elementary question here, but does winning the championship, do you think that might make them change your mind and allow you to say and if they offered you a chance to stay, would it take it?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It all depends.  We’ll just have to do those talks this week and see what happens.  Obviously this is what I came in to do as a goal, and now I’ve done that with this team.  It’s not anything that I did specifically.  It’s not anything that Tony did.  It’s not anything that Gene did.  It’s the whole group as a whole.  We went out and earned this championship.  Now we’ll just see what comes out of that.

Q.  Obviously your team knows the situation, Tony knows the situation; how did you hold it all together for the past ten races, and make it work, especially the past five after they notified you?  Did you have to meet with the team or Tony?  What was the relationship like?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Definitely it was a little tough and strained but it honestly probably made the guys rally around a little more just because we all felt like we were a team to beat, and we wanted to prove that.

So we just did it.  Everybody went out there and kept doing their jobs, kept their head up and didn’t crack anybody down.  We may have even gotten closer as a team after that.  We had a couple of excursions where we went out as a team and did some activities and had a lot of fun and really enjoyed it.

Q.  How would you describe working with, what it’s like to work with Tony?

GENE HAAS:  Tony has taken on a hat of being an owner, and unfortunately there’s a lot of responsibilities that come with that as far as personnel changes and personnel problems, human resources and paying paychecks and all that stuff.  So, you know, Tony takes that to heart and I think it can upset the way he races.

So, you know, myself and Joe and all of the management at Stewart-Haas Racing, what we really tried to do in the last year or so was just isolate him from that; make sure that Tony just concentrated on the driving part.  Tony works really hard at driving.  He also works really hard at working with sponsors.  I mean, I’ve never seen a guy that spends every single day, either driving the car, or going to sponsors, or dealing with his other businesses.

Now, you know, like I say, like Joe and Brett, we all really tried to isolate Tony from that stuff and let Tony drive the car, we think that’s what he does and that’s what he does best.  But he’s also pretty good to work with, sometimes.

KERRY THARP:  Okay.  Tony Stewart has joined us.  Tony is now the three-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion.  And Tony, a lot of adjectives describe what you did over the Chase.  One I keep hearing is “clutch.”  Just talk about a clutch performance by you over the last ten races.

TONY STEWART:  I would have lost every bet in the world if people would have said, hey, when you got in the Chase, that we were going to win a race or we were going to win five races and win this thing; I would have bet against us.  And I learned a big lesson with our organization and, you know, how strong a program we have and people-wise.  I mean, everybody has good cars and good equipment, but you know, I’m sure Darian’s mentioned it, it’s the people you have that make the difference.

When I said at Chicago that we didn’t belong in this Chase and taking a space that somebody else that was doing a better job could have done, there were two things that could have happened with our group of guys.  They could have hung our head and said, our guy doesn’t believe in us or they do have done, which is exactly what they did, and that’s never give up, and they dug their heels in.  They fought like the Bad News Bears.  We were the team that nobody really thought had a shot at the beginning, and you know, the longer this went, we battled adversity at Dover and Texas and we just kept fighting, this whole group up here.  I mean, Darian has done an unbelievable job in this Chase.  Just to go and be in the situations we’ve been in, and tonight, for example, to, a, go in and have to fix a damaged race car twice, go to the back and come back to the front, and then to make the call that he made at the end there, my – I need to take a nap right now.  (Laughter) My nerves are absolutely shot.  Because when he said save fuel, but run his pace, I’m like, I’m running hard to run his pace.

So he pits about two laps later, and I’m like, we can’t – we are having the discussion, I can’t run that pace and save fuel.  So it’s like, you’ve got to tell me which one is more important right now.

I’m definitely one that can’t hear in one here out the other and I’m he said something and I’m like, all right, got to go.  And then he pits and I go into fuel conservation mode, and it’s really, really hard to watch guys just come barreling past you and to stay disciplined enough to just stick to the plan.

You know, I didn’t question what the plan was or why the plan was.  I just stuck to what he told me, and you know, the lap that he called us in, he called us in going into turn one, and when I came off turn two, the fuel pressure dropped, the motor laid down a little bit but was still running.  When I got to turn three, I shut it off, coasted around to turn four, kicked the switch, kicked the clutch.  Drove down pit road.  We did the spot and he’s like keep it revving, keep it running; and I’m staring at a fuel pressure gauge that’s not building.  It’s sitting at two pounds.

And we dropped the jack, leave, get 50 foot from the last time line and it dies.  I mean, it’s dead.  It’s out.  And I’m like, we just lost this thing, and we roll about a hundred feed and it takes off and the needle goes up and we are fourth at that point, and Carl has to come back in, and it’s like, wow, that is the call of the race, the call of the Chase, and it gave me the opportunity to do what I love doing best, letting it all hang out and putting it all on the line with the restart.

And that was the one, probably hairy moment of anything that I did all day where I felt like, oohh, maybe I just lost this, and got loose underneath the 18 and the 2, and it was a three-wide drag race down the three, and the way this thing drove all day, it was really good side-bite.  I knew I could bury it down in the corner.  I just didn’t know if I was going to make the front and stick out the back, and we drive back out with the lead; and at that point you just sit there and go, this is all you can ask for is where we are at right now and whatever happens, it happens.

The funny part was listening to Darian actually get nervous at that point.  The hard part is done at that point.  We are where we need to be.  He’s like, “Okay, I’m not going giving you lap times any more, I’m giving you intervals.”

You could tell the way he said that, it made me laugh in the car, and that relaxed me more than anything the last 30 laps.  He’s just reading intervals off every lap, and we are just running hard enough to – it wasn’t like we were saving much.  But we saved just enough that if we had a green-and-white checkered, we would have saved our tires enough to do a good job at the end.  But getting in lap traffic, he was able to gain a little bit and we were able to fight through some of those guys and pull back out.

So just you never are more excited to see a white flag waving in your life.  You at least take the white and know that if the caution comes out, it’s over, and you only have to make it one more lap.  I would love to know what my lap time was the last lap.  I don’t think we gave up much.  It just was an awesome ending.

And to get both of these guys beside me their first championship, it is an unbelievable feeling.  From the ownership side, it’s more gratifying knowing that the investment that Gene’s made in this sport and Darian’s history in this sport and to be a part of getting them their first championship, that on the ownership side for me is the greatest – and if you didn’t think this was one of the most exciting Chases to watch from a fan standpoint, you’ve got to go to a doctor immediately and get checked out.  So I don’t even know what else to say about it.

Q.  You were making three- and four-wide passes tonight that we all were kind of left with our mouths open and then A.J. said that, “I think Tony drove the best race of his life.”    Was this the best race of your life?  And is it fair to say that you’ve been driving this way for four, five, six weeks?

TONY STEWART:  I think so.  But as much as I would love to beat my chest and say that I’ve been just doing something supernatural, I mean, I’ve had cars that have given me that confidence to do that.

And you know, to go four-wide on the front stretch like that and to have the confidence that when you get to turn one, that you can make the corner still, I mean, that’s a good-handling race car that gives you that.  I mean, I’ve got – I’ve had confidence in these things and you look at the first half of our year and how many things that happened, and lots of things that never happened at the end of the day, we would battle to a respectable finish out of it.

But we are disappointed because we knew there was more there.  It’s really frustrating.  But in the Chase here, it just seemed like finally we got through that bad luck string, and everything worked like it’s supposed to.  No curveballs, no change ups.  Just business as usual.  Today was the first time I thought, oh, man, when he said, we have got to come in, it’s like, oh, I didn’t question it.  I didn’t know what was going on, because I never even felt the impact.

Normally you feel something if you hit something with the nose of the car and to hit it with the wire mesh like that, that screen, it just kills that.  How it didn’t go through the radiator, I have no idea.

But, you know, to have something like that actually go our way for once, it was nice to finally get that bad luck streak out of the way and get to where we could work on just doing what we do best.

Q.  Was this the best race of your life?

TONY STEWART:  Man, I feel like I passed half the State of Florida (Laughter).  118 cars is a lot of cars to pass in one race.  I don’t care what series you’re in or where you’re at.  To do it under the circumstances and the pressure that we had today, I’m very, very proud of that, and man, I’ve been racing 31 years, I can’t even remember some of the races I’ve won.  But I would have to say that under the circumstances, I’ve got to believe that this is definitely one of the greatest races of my life.

Q.  You drove today like you were not going to lose this race; you were going to either – you were either going to win this thing or you were leaving it all on –

TONY STEWART:  I think the last five years, the entire NASCAR nation thought they might never have a shot at another championship again.

I think the one thing that I was constantly reminded by in the media is we were the last guys to win one before Jimmie started that string.  You look at Jeff and guys that have been successful in this series and had not won, and we had won a more recent one than those guys have; you can’t discard it and say that you can’t win it.

It’s just, what do you have to do to get back on top.  You know, I don’t think anybody ever has that feeling.  The day that you just say, I can’t do it any more, you might as well just announce your retirement and find some young kid that will do it.

Q.  I know you just noted – congratulations, gentlemen, all of you, by the way.  I know you just noted that this is one much your best performances of your career.  Your hero said it was the best.  What does it mean that someone you admire to that level considers this performance that stellar?

TONY STEWART:  For those of you who don’t know, when we were doing one of the ESPN interviews, they had a surprise phone call for us on the line, and it was A.J. Foyt.  And to hear him say that that was the best race he’s ever seen me run, brings a tear to your eye.  I mean, not many people can have their lifelong hero say that and hear you say that.

It’s just very, very flattering.  The one thing out of the conversation I was surprised, even when I drove Silver Crown cards for him and George Schneider, I would still win the race and he would tell me everything I did wrong during the race.  For once he didn’t tell me I did anything wrong.  I’m like, I don’t know how I’m going to top this now.  My life is complete.  If I get hit on a golf cart now, I’m good to go because A.J. said I did everything perfect for once.

It was an honor.  That was probably one of the coolest phone calls I’ve ever had in my life obviously.  You know, to go into a day like today when you know what’s at stake and it’s not just – you know, it’s the head-to-head battle, obviously one guy versus another; but with 40 other variables out there, and have him leading the first half of the race and dominating it like he did; if he stayed second or third, we still had to win the race, so to have a battle like that, you just sit here you and shake your head and sit here and figure, it was one of the coolest championship battles, but what do I have to do to beat that guy?  I felt like I had to throw everything I had in my arsenal out.

And when we were coming around with the flag sticking out of the car, he walked up and he said you’re going to have fun with this for the rest of your life.  You couldn’t ask for a better guy.  And he goes, “I hope a year from now, we are in the same battle again just like this.”  And that – everybody respects Carl for the person that he is, and you know, there’s been a lot of things that have happened that make you go, is there sincerity involved in what he says.  But there’s no cameras there when he said that.  He just came and talked to me driver to driver, and that means a lot and it shows who he is as a person I think.

I know there’s times he hasn’t done everything perfect and he’s taken it upon himself to settle scores, but I think deep down, at moments like that and at Texas when he came out there and we had that conversation, it shows who he really is as a person, and he’ll win a championship.  He’ll be up here in our position again, maybe be the guy on the losing end but when he gets it, hope he has to beat us to do it again.  I appreciated that championship battle.  It was a David versus Goliath battle to the end.

To have the week that we had, and the sparring that we had at Media Day, and to come here and finish the season running first and second, I just – I don’t know how it gets better than that.  No matter what the outcome was, there would have been no shame in finishing second to him tonight in the championship.  But to have that battle come down to me, that’s epic.

Q.  You sounded so calm on the radio, reassuring your team, kind of a leader on the team, but who was reassuring you?  Did you have some doubts at any point?  Did you think, maybe this is just not meant to be?

TONY STEWART:  I think this summer has kind of been character-building to a certain degree.  The good thing is, I think the guys, when you’re in the role that I am, I feel like that there’s some added pressure there from my standpoint, even being in the car.  Darian is the guy that they feed off in the pits obviously, because they are the – Darian is the guy that they read.  But I think we have been a really good team from that aspect of – that was – when we hung the lug nut today, I thought – I thought that was one of the key moments in the race where, you know, you could lose your composure, and I think Darian’s calling of the audible of saying, we are going to make this a two-tire stop now, that was huge.  We didn’t give up any more track position.  We had a car that was fast.  And that was big, and I pulled into the stop and had no idea what’s happened and that’s probably the first time in the Chase I raised my voice, what the heck just happened.  And Darian’s demeanor from when we started in 2009, is he’s been calm and you know, he told me it hung the lug nut but the way he says it, in a way, that, just, all right, it is what it is.  It’s nothing to get excited about.  You know, when we had the restart that we had, it’s like, hey, you know, you looked at how the first 109 laps went before the rain delay came, it’s like, so we hung the lug nut and we are back to 12 now.

I think the way our season went and the way the first 100 laps of the race went, it was easy to put into perspective, it wasn’t as good of a drama as we thought.  Carl made a pit stop, but that wasn’t when they paid the points and dropped the flag.  There was a lot of racing to go.

And it goes back to nobody has ever quit on this team and you know, like I said, I think the season has been character-building and when something like that’s happened it’s easy to feel like you’re backing yourself in a corner but the way our day was and to battle back from the back twice in those first hundred laps, I thought gave us that confidence that it wasn’t the end of the world and that we could recover from it.

Q.  You had to make a tough decision, you said, when you parted ways with Bobby Hutchins –

TONY STEWART:  I wasn’t responsible for that.  I was responsible for getting Darian and Bobby and Tony Gibson.  They were the guys that really said, this is what we need people-wise and personnel wise.

So you know, Gene gave me the faith and the trust to go get the people that I felt like that we needed to get, and a lot of that was Rick Hendrick, too.  Rick was the one that said, hey, this guy is the guy that I think is going to be a good fit for you.

You know, that’s the push in the right direction that you need from somebody like that to give you that confidence.  But Bobby and Darian and Tony together, I think all three were very instrumental in orchestrating what personnel we needed to take what resources Gene had already established to make it all work and make it all come together.

Q.  You’ve obviously heaped praise on Darian and deservedly so.  But before you came in here, he had mentioned that it’s under his impression that he’s out of a job for next season.  Can you at all shed some light on his status?  I know it’s kind of awkward with him sitting right there.

TONY STEWART:  I know what his status is for the rest of the night, and I’m going to get him drunk.  (Laughter).

Tomorrow if we can just pick our heads up off the floor without throwing up, I’m going to be extremely happy, but I’ll worry about that tomorrow.

Q.  Is there a chance that he could return or can you say anything?

TONY STEWART:  There’s a lot of things in the off-season and decisions that have to be made.  Obviously we wanted to get through this championship battle first, and we’ll sit down as a group, obviously, this week and figure out the direction of our program.

But, you know, the good thing right now is that we are sitting up here right now as champions and I don’t think any of us are really too concerned other than having fun tonight and enjoying the accomplishment we have had over the last ten weeks.

Q.  Given that, does that put a different perspective on this championship run that despite that uncertainty and I would assume that created more duress, Darian talked about how maybe it was a little bit of a tension builder at times, can you talk about how you were able to overcome that and still do everything and win the championship despite all that?

TONY STEWART:  I think the way this whole Chase has worked out for us, for us to battle through a number of variables to get where we are is remarkable.  But it shows the strength of the people that we have and you know it definitely – it definitely makes you go, how did we do this, how did we overcome a lot of variables to get where we are.  But at the same time, it makes it very gratifying because you are able to take a less than perfect scenario and have success with it.

So, I think we are all up here going to take a lot of pride in that.

Q.  You kind of spoke about this a little bit, but people that know you well have said, I’ve never seen him more determined.  And we have seen you through various championships, but this one felt different, almost like Babe Ruth, pointing what you were going to do, and you did.  Can you talk about your approach and determination and the way it played out, especially in the last two or three weeks.

TONY STEWART:  Boy did I look like a genius after doing this.  (Laughter).

You know, it’s like I said, I mean, it’s one thing for me to have confidence as a driver, but you have to have confidence in your guys and your equipment and the guys making the calls.

You know, I honestly think the turning point for us was Martinsville.  We had struggled at Martinsville the three races before this fall, and to battle, to stay on the lead lap, and once we stayed on the lead lap there, to battle back to the lead and to win the race with the drama that we have won the race, I have yet to have anybody tell me who has passed for the lead on the outside to win the race at Martinsville.

To leave there doing something remarkable, I feel that was the turning point in the Chase for us.  And we backed it up a week later by winning Texas and not only winning Texas but by beating the guy that we are racing the points for, leading the most laps and really making a statement that, hey, do not count – don’t make the mistake of counting us out of this.

And you know, I just think that was a huge turning point for us, and you get that confidence that everything is going right and that – it’s so much easier when things are going well.  Everybody relaxes.  Everybody is calm.  You’re not trying to mentally figure out what the missing piece of the puzzle is.

You know, I think Martinsville was kind of that step that we may not have had a perfect car that day and we may not have had a perfect race, but we fought through it and came out on top, and to battle like that at Texas all day, it just – at that point, you sit there and you go, we have got as good a shot, if not better, than anybody else out there, and it doesn’t matter who is still left.  We are a contender now.  And that’s the kind of confidence you want going into the last two weeks.

Q.  This race had an epic feel to it from the beginning, Carl said it was an unbelievable movie the way it unfolded.  Did you have any feeling or sense of that in the seat of the car as the night was going on?

TONY STEWART:  Gene says I’ve got to watch the rerun.

KERRY THARP:  It’s on at 1:00 am.

TONY STEWART:  I’ll be up.  (Laughter) may not be able to focus on the screen, but I’ll be up.

It did.  I don’t know that it necessarily had that feel, but you know, the story line was pretty amazing.  You’ve got a guy that goes out and is leading the points standings, qualifies on the pole and is dominating the first part of the race.

The guy that’s the underdog and the guy that’s three points behind is having to jump hurdles and jump through hoops to salvage their day.  And then we come and battle back – when we had that red flag at lap 109, I’m sitting out there, I’m just laughing with the crew guys.  There’s crew guys going, what are you doing, what’s going on here.

And they are going, where are you coming from?  I’m like, where else am I going to go?  I don’t have anything else to do.  If I crash this thing on the way to the front, so be it.  And it wasn’t that I was throwing caution to the wind.  We were trying to be calculated and methodical about what we were doing.  But the story lines are total opposites.  You have the guy that’s got the perfect race going, he’s leading laps and when he’s not leading, he’s second or third, and he is right where he wants to be and he’s in the position he wants to be in all day long at that point and you have the other guy that’s like, man, can we get there from here.  You feel like you have the big fish on the hook and you’re running out of line and wondering if you’re going to run out soon.

When you sit there and when we took the lead the first time, I think it had to make him go, how did they – you know in the red flag he’s sitting there going what’s going on with them.  Well, they have come back from the back twice and are fifth now?  You know he’s thinking that.

And I’m sitting there with Jack Roush, and I walk by Jack and I say, “Tell your boy to get you will on the wheel because I’m on my way and I’m coming.”  I’ve screwed with everybody all week, why am I going to stop now?  Jack looks at me like I’ve got three heads all of a sudden and I don’t know it’s because he couldn’t see me or what was going on, he kind of looked at me – (Laughter) I’m joking, come on.  Doug is sitting there laughing because he know what is I’m doing, and Jack looks at me funny, went about my business and got back in the car, laughing about it.  We still have nothing to lose and just keep slinging it at him.  When we wind up taking the lead, he has to be sitting there going, how did they do that, they got tore up twice, how did they get there.

So, yeah, storyline was pretty cool I thought, up to that point.

Q.  This is a little bit of a provincial question in that this is big news –

TONY STEWART:  You have to use small words.  I have no idea what kind of question that means.

Q.  It means back in your home state this is really big news, you winning another championship when you were coming up, everybody wanted to be the next A.J. Foyt and now guys in that state want to be the next Tony Stewart –

TONY STEWART:  They should set their standards much higher than that.

Q.  Talk about bringing this title back to your home state.

TONY STEWART:  I’m proud of where I came from.  I mean, you know, my career path made a pretty drastic turn and I don’t know how many people actually know.  I had a chance to drive for A.J. when the IRL started, and I had been working on a deal with Harry to join the Busch Series at the time and was really close to having that done, and my intention was to do that, and then all of a sudden the opportunity came to drive for A.J. and the IRL and the IRL only had five races.

So I had every intention of doing both.  I was used to running Silver Crown car, midgets, all in the same night and I couldn’t see why I couldn’t run five IndyCar races and the schedule – A.J. kind of put the kibosh to that, he wanted me to be an IndyCar driver or NASCAR driver, and that was a pretty hard decision to make; to tell your hero that you are going to turn down an opportunity to drive his race car to go do something else.

But I had worked with the Rainier family long enough, I didn’t want to let them down and I didn’t necessarily want to turn down that opportunity – didn’t have to worry about what was going to happen.  From where I grew up, and my heritage – demanding moments and I take a lot of pride in the fact that we are going to be bringing a trophy back home.

Q.  What’s it going to be like?

TONY STEWART:  I already know that Bob at the Dairy Queen has already been giving away ice cream tonight and he will tell me to the penny exactly how much he lost doing it, literally to the cent, he will tell me how much money it cost him.  (Laughter).

I live in a town with 35,000 people and I’ve still got the same friends that I had growing up.  You know, when I go home, people let me just be me.  They see me in a restaurant, they will come by and say hi.  I’ve been back home long enough now, I think the news wore off, and I’m just another person.  It’s a sense of pride that when the people in your community come up and say they are proud of you and you did a good job, that means a lot.  I’m excited about the day I get to go home now.

Q.  You obviously had a lot of fun poking Carl and whatnot this week but –

TONY STEWART:  I don’t poke Carl.  I made that real clear.  I like women.  (Laughter) I won’t be poking Carl.  I pick on Carl a lot.

Q.  Try to rephrase the question.

TONY STEWART:  I just really, really want to make sure nobody gets the wrong idea about this.

Q.  It will be an interesting transcript.  But anyway.  Regardless, was there ever a moment where in your head there was just a slight bit of doubt or nervousness or whatever it might be that kind of creeped into your head during this whole run leading up to it?

TONY STEWART:  Oddly enough, I mean, there should have been a moment like that.  And I can’t – that’s been the one thing that’s probably been the one variable in the equation that I have not been able to understand and get my hands around, is that there just never was that moment of feeling despair and like, can we really do this.

We were in the perfect scenario of coming into this weekend with no possible shot of losing anything contrary to what my favorite guy mentioned on Media Day there, we honestly just did not – we physically could not lose anything.  There was nothing to lose.  And there was everything to gain.  And with that, there is absolute – it takes so much pressure off when you know that if anything happens, that you are not going to be any worse than second and considering the fact that ten weeks ago, we were saying that we were wasting a spot in the Chase to begin with, second wasn’t so bad, if that’s what happened.

But at the same time, I mean, you don’t have to dangle the caret in front of us to get our spurs jingling to get excited about what we can get and what we can reach.

I meant what I said in Media Day, that it’s a dangerous combination when you give a guy a shot at something and he can’t lose anything.  That’s a potent situation to be in for our organization and our team and myself.  I honestly can’t say that there was that moment that I felt that way.  I guess it was just the perfect scenario; I really wanted to leave Phoenix.  Honestly, I wanted to leave Phoenix with the point lead and I thought that would really be the best opportunity to rattle his confidence.

But in hindsight, we came here, and there was never a moment where I was wound up – I was up at 2:30 in the morning this morning, couldn’t sleep, and I was watching every stupid movie you could think of on TV because I was having fun.  And it just – and I couldn’t explain it.  I don’t understand it.  But that’s where we were at with it.  It just felt natural.  There was something that felt right with it, and then never had that moment where I felt like we couldn’t do this or that something could go wrong.  If it did, it did.  But we had more to gain than we had to lose.

I can’t shut up tonight, either.  I’m ready to get out of here.  Somebody stop me.  (Laughter).

Q.  Darian was talking earlier, and he’s been telling us for a while, he’s felt like the cars have been good most of the season and he mentioned the Atlanta race where you came from like 20th to third, and talking about all of the great changes they made and they told you afterwards there were no changes made at all –

TONY STEWART:  You didn’t change anything?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Not at Atlanta.

TONY STEWART:  You liar.

Q.  Was this turnaround more about you recapturing something you had lost, a confidence more so than the cars and that?

TONY STEWART:  I mean, I don’t know.  I’ve been deceived here by my crew chief.  I had no idea that that’s what was going on in Atlanta.

I don’t know.  I’ve been doing this a long time.  I’ve never felt like I really lost anything.  When we won that Out law race earlier this year, I know it has nothing to do – inaudible – cars and win races, and I’m not just stuck doing it here and not just able to win here and nowhere else.

So maybe it sparked something then, I don’t know, but I never felt like anything really changed from that standpoint.  I just, you know, I had a lot of fun this year.  I mean, Darian and Gene have let me go off racing any night I wanted to race and I got to run 30 nights this year away from NASCAR and had a blast doing it.  I think that was as much as it scares Eddie Jarvis and our management worrying about me getting hurt and how many people it can affect, Darian can tell you, when I would come back, it energized me.  It was like hitting a reset button.  It was fun.  I had fun racing again this year.  I think it transferred to what we were doing with the Cup car, too.  We would have fun Saturday night and Sunday, even if it wasn’t right or didn’t work out, I still had fun doing what I was doing again, and I think that made a big difference.

So, I don’t know if I really thought about it a bunch, but maybe it did.

Q.  You’ve talked before about the history of NASCAR and tonight you’ve made that history.  What do you want the history books to say about you and your season as you look forward for that?

TONY STEWART:  They can write whatever they want.  The biggest thing to me is we got the trophy and I think the biggest thing is it’s not about what they write about me.  It’s what they write about us.  I mean, I really appreciate the opportunity that Gene and Joe Custer have given us, and I appreciate what Darian has done from day one.  He played more than a crew chief role.

And there were a lot of really good people that have had to work outside of the box of what their job description was to get us here.  I think that’s what makes great teams great is people don’t just sit there and look at their job as a 9 to 5 job or whatever their hours are and they show up and leave whenever that hour gets there.  I know there’s been times when he has had to come in and stay late and there’s people that have made that sacrifice.  To the best of our knowledge, I don’t think anybody has complained about it.  We just have a bunch of racers and I probably take the most pride in that.  We have people that come from so many different racing backgrounds, and their attitude at the shop is just a bunch of racers who love racing and winning races and I’m really proud of that.

Q.  The other day we talked about book ending, now that you’ve achieved it, what do you feel like it means to your organizations?

TONY STEWART:  Very proud.  Donny won the last sprint car race of the season last night, an USAC race at Tucson and Levy won the last race of the year with our Chevy car and to be able to come here tonight and do this, we have – Levy won the Silver Crown championship, Sprint Car Championship.  We ran second with Donny Schatz and third with Steve in World of Outlaws.  I don’t know where Ryan officially ended up tonight points-wise – tenth.  So two cars in the Top-10 in the Sprint Cup Series, I’m pretty proud of that.  Probably as close to being a father as I’m going to get for a while, and I’m pretty proud of all my kids, even though one is 50 years old and still winning races.

I’m proud of our people.  I feel like I’ve said it from day one, I’ve been a part of this organization, I learned a lot from Joe Gibbs and how he was able to assemble the right people to do the right jobs.  I feel like I’ve learned a very valuable lesson from him, and I think that I’ve been able to take that approach with every entity that we have and we have been successful and I’m proud of Chevy being on board and STP and Armor All and all of the people that have believed in the programs I’ve wanted to build and helped us make them successful.

Q.  Why would you leave Joe Gibbs Racing when you did?  You were comfortable there, you could win there, you didn’t have to have any real responsibilities and take all this John –

TONY STEWART:  Joe would tell you different.  He would tell you I had all kind of responsibilities.

Q.  What kind of pressure do you take with you?  Do you wonder, am I ever going to win again?  You’re leaving a really comfortable, nice place.

TONY STEWART:  I think the variable that was the little bit of the push over the top that I needed, it came from Rick Hendrick, and Rick had had a relationship with Gene and the two teams working together in the past.  When Rick called me and said, hey, this may be an opportunity for you, and where I was at in my life and my career, you know, I guess I’ve never been scared to step outside my comfort zone with opportunities.  We own three racetracks now, we have our world out law teams, our USAC teams.  I didn’t have a background in any of that.  I don’t have a background in business.

But you know, it just seemed like everything, every challenge that we took, we were able to somewhat kind some sort of success with it, and Rick talked to me on the phone one night and he goes, I’m not going to let this fail.  That’s words that I have never forgot.  And there’s been times when I’ve had to call and say, hey, I don’t know what to do, I’m kind of stuck.  But I need your input.  I just need somebody to tell me if what I’m thinking is right, wrong or indifferent.  And he’s been really strong in that role with me.  So you’ve got to have people you believe in.  You’ve got to have people you trust, and it’s just another chapter in my life that it’s like, this is a great opportunity for what’s going on now and what can happen down the road one day.  There’s a day that I’m not going to be driving but I don’t want to leave the sport.  It’s a great opportunity for me to drive till Gene fires me from the driver’s seat and I get to sit on the pit box with him.  I like that opportunity.  It was an opportunity to have a fresh start, a fresh beginning and a new challenge, and I love new challenges for some reason.

Q.  In that same vein, did you ever regret the decision to become a co-owner and what do you feel this championship can do for your organization as a whole?

TONY STEWART:  I would be lying if I said there were a lot of nights I laid my head on a pillow and said, have you lost your mind.  It was a lot easier being a driver.  And there was a lot of responsibility that came with being a driver in a big organization, but you know, there’s a lot of worries.  It’s still a business.  This is a big industry and it’s my goal from day one has been to be able to look Gene Haas in the eyes and shake his hand and say, hey, it didn’t cost you a dime this year to go race, I want you to just come to the track and have fun and enjoy what you’ve built.  Our economy has been rough the last three years and it’s been a challenge to do that.

But I’m proud with the new partners that we have had come on board.  We are in the best financial situation our company has been in and there’s still an inventory of races to be sold in our company.  Hopefully an effort like we have had in the Chase and the championship like this can be a push that some of these companies need to maybe come on board.  So this is big for our company as an organization.  It’s a hard time with the economy and definitely a championship like this is huge.

Q.  As far as you’re being compared to the greatest drivers ever, like your heroes, can you share with us what you feel you have, physical and mental abilities, that you can share with the greatest people that ever got behind the wheel?

TONY STEWART:  All you have to do is look at me and — inaudible — looking how I compare to A.J. Foyt and following that same path – don’t sit there in a gym and don’t eat the right foods every day and can still go out and do what they do, take some pride in that today.  (Laughter) I’m going to take a lot of pride in a lot of stuff.

But, you know, I’m nothing –

Q.  Inaudible.

TONY STEWART:  Yeah, I represent you guys – not you, Jenna.  And some of you more than others obviously.  (Laughter).

I have a hard time putting it in perspective what it means with these guys and the greats of these sports and the legends of this sport.  You feel like you’re comparing apples to oranges because you’re comparing different eras in our sport.  It’s hard to put that in perspective I think.

But you know, I feel like I’m a part of a time in NASCAR when the competition’s better than it’s ever been.  It’s more competitive than it’s ever been.  And to be in a format that’s very tight, very competitive, and you can’t have anything go wrong to win five races out of a ten-race Chase, and to win closest battle in NASCAR history, you know, no matter what the record books say at the end of the day and the greats that are a part of it, it’s a huge honor just to be in those record books with those guys, and you never feel like you’re – I don’t care how many races you win, how many championships you win, you never feel like you measure up to the greats of the sport.  That’s what makes trying so much fun.

KERRY THARP:  Tony, you certainly put on one outstanding performance the past ten weeks.  You’re the 2011 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion.  Much deserved.  Congratulations on truly a terrific performance here tonight that I think not only the folks in this room, but millions across the world are going to look back and say that this was one of the greats in all of sports.  Congratulations.

And I do have one final question for you.

TONY STEWART:  Boy do I feel like I should really be nervous, I felt like I’ve skirted around – I’ve played dodgeball for an hour up here and thought I was going to make it out of here okay.

KERRY THARP:  By winning this race tonight, Tony is going to take home a Contender boat that is built right here in Homestead Florida and it’s right out in victory lane, 400 horsepower worth a lot of money.  Do you have any idea what you’re going to name your boat?

TONY STEWART:  I just hope I don’t get so screwed up tonight that I find the keys on accident and try riding it around on the lake on the backstretch.  (Laughter) Maybe we’ll call it, “Hope We Don’t Screw Up.”

Thank you, guys, appreciate it.

Darian welcome and why don’t you talk about your thoughts and strategies on winning the championship this weekend at Homestead Miami Speedway?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Thanks for having me on.  Just trying to do the same thing we’ve been doing the last half of the season.  Just going out there for maximum points.  We know if we win the race, that’s our goal.  We can’t finish any worse than second.  That’s what we do.  We go out there for the win.

Q.  Darian, you had a good run last year even though Tony’s history there has been kind of hit and miss since they reconfigured the track.  Where do you go for your baseline setting there?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It’s a good thing for us that we did run good there last year because that is a very similar set-up to what we’ve run good at with the mile and a halves this year.  We’ve hit on that set-up last year.  We’ve been doing it ever since.

We felt like we should be faster.  We felt like we had a definite Top 5 car.  We feel like it’s worked out this year at Vegas, and all the tracks that are fairly similar where we feel we can take a lot of that data over to Homestead and have a good year.

Q.  Given how close Tony and Carl are at this point, can you tell me what kind of pressure is on a crew chief at this point to really hit the set-up, given even a couple of positions can cost either driver here?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It’s about the same as it is every other week, honestly.  We want to go out there and have the best set-up we possibly can have, and also have the adaptability to it where if something goes different with the track condition we have to be able to adjust to those changes as the race goes on.  Make sure the car was fast enough all day long regardless of the situation we’re put in.

We go down there like we do week to shoot to be the fastest car off the truck, fastest car in qualifying, and fastest car in the race.  The pressure is the same.  This week there is a little more on the line, but the majority of that we just put on the driver’s shoulders because we still do the same job in the pits every week.

Q.  I asked the same thing of Bob.  It’s just a back grounder question.  But you have a mechanical engineering degree from Virginia Tech, I read.  When you were studying for that, was your career plan toward NASCAR or in a different direction?  If it was in a different direction, how did you veer into what you’re doing now?

DARIAN GRUBB:  That’s pretty funny.  I’m just very happy working with anything mechanical.  I worked in my dad’s construction company growing up and have a mechanical mind.  I took all my toys apart, destroyed them and put them back together all those things.  That’s how I got into the mechanical engineering kind of thing.

Racing, was kind of a byproduct of that.  I just had a lot of friends that were involved in Friday and Saturday night shows around home and I got involved in that.  I was doing it as a hobby all the time on weekends.  Leaving classes early to make sure I could make it to the tracks in Florida if that’s where we were running that weekend and things like that.

I put my resume on the internet and got a job doing my hobby as a full-time job.  I can’t ask for anything better than that.  I was paying my own way and doing everything for it, and now I get to do the best thing in the world having a job as a hobby.  So it’s pretty cool.

Q.  What was your first job out of college?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Product design engineer with a heavy trucking industry.  I designed aerodynamic devices and stuff for Volvo trucks.  The big rigs you see on the highway.

Q.  What did you most bring from the Hendrick operation over to Tony’s?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I would say probably just the mentality of empowering the people around you to do the best they can do from the positions.  Mr. Hendrick has instilled that in the organization.

Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned from him is making sure the people around you are strong enough to do what you want to do so you don’t take all that load yourself.  Jeff Meendering and Jonathan and Scott, and all the guys we have here on the team do a great job taking their workload, and me not having to babysit all the time.  They do a great job of getting the job done.  I’m able to concentrate on what I need to concentrate on to be a good crew chief.

Q.  I saw you on NASCAR Now on Sunday morning, and I thought you said something interesting.  You were talking about how Stewart-Haas, the cars have been good for some time now.  Then you said the driver is now up on the wheel.  So has something changed with Tony over the last nine weeks in the way he’s driving or the way he’s attacking races?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I really think it has.  I think it’s now more that we are in the Chase, we are in contention, and just that little extra fire is there in every person on the team.  Everybody’s trying that extra 10% to make sure everything we do is topnotch.

We try to do that every week, but now that everything is on the line the last ten weeks, that it’s a little bit easier to know what your goal is.  You’re always wanting to run good, but now we know the championship is the end goal, and it’s within our reach.  So that extra little bit of fire and desire is what you’re seeing on the racetrack.

Q.  There’s been so much speculation about the team.  You guys have been without a competition director for half of the year.  Are you going to be back with Stewart-Haas next year?

DARIAN GRUBB:  We’ll leave that to after Sunday and figure out what’s going to happen there.  Our goal is to win the championship and we’ll decide everything else after that.

Q.  Along those same lines, has it been difficult at all to work through the last few months with all the rumors and uncertainty and not knowing necessarily who is going to be in what position where next year?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Definitely not.  We’ve still got the same goals we’ve always had that we want to go out and win the championship.  Winning races is the way to do that.  What we’ve done the last nine weeks, we’ve shown that we have the capability to do that.  We’re almost 50-50 on that, so hopefully we can continue that streak and get it to be a 50% deal and win at Homestead.

Q.  Is there anything – have you guys found a better set-up with this new tire the last couple of months?  Or is there something – I mean, have you found or just hit on something that you feel has caused this kind of turnaround?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I really don’t think so.  There are tracks that we’ve had new tires and tracks that we’ve had the same tires.  A lot of it is continuing to build on that notebook that we’ve been building for three years now.  We’ve gotten better at some tracks and gotten worse at some tracks with the things we’re trying.

A lot of things just stacked up to where we’ve had the good data we’ve needed to have for the last ten races and being able to apply that to the racetrack.  Everybody’s just digging in a little deeper and working a little bit harder trying to find whatever’s left out there for performance.

The competition level is so high that you have to be on top of the game.  You can’t settle on what you’re doing before and think you’re going to be competitive.  You have to progress every week.

Q.  I think I’ve sort of asked one of my questions.  I haven’t been able to figure out a specific thing that turned it from you at the time Tony was complaining in Michigan to the start of the chase.  So there is nothing specific you can point to in that time period that turned it this season?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Definitely not.  We haven’t changed anything in the game plan and they way we’ve been approaching every week.  We’ve been doing the same job since the start of the season.

We’ve had chances to win at least four out of the first five races, and it always still kind of gets on my nerves looking back and seeing how we didn’t win in Vegas.  That was the one win Carl got.  Those are the three points he came into the Chase as a bonus over us, so that is the gap right now.  That is the definite six-point turn around.  We would have had three, and he would have lost three at that point.

Everybody has those what-ifs all the way during the season.  So we’ve had fast cars, and we’ve had chances to win races that we didn’t capitalize on.  Now all those things seem to keep rolling our direction now that we seem to not have the bad luck and the issues that we’ve had mid-season.  So now we’ll try to keep that momentum and that ball rolling.

Q.  One other thing I was wondering about is this a sign that Hendrick equipment is still sort of the dominant equipment – that Hendrick equipment is still the best in the garage?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I have to think so.  That’s what I’m used to and familiar with.  So we were able to perform year-in and year-out with what we do.  With what Mark Whitman and the guys in the chassis shop do and Jeff Andrews the guys in the engine shop.  I don’t think we’re lacking for anything.  We’re able to go out there and compete with the best of the best every weekend.  90% of the time we’re able to come out on top.  I feel like we’re definitely not lacking anything there.

But I think the competition level has definitely stepped up between all the programs.  It’s a definite battle every week.  You’re going to see the strengths of every organization every week, and we just hope we can capitalize on it when the time comes.

Q.  I know you’ve talked about this some in the past but could you talk about winning the Daytona 500 with Jimmie and 2006 and that whole experience of jumping in with him and how that may compare with what a championship might mean to you in this role?

DARIAN GRUBB:  That was really cool being able to step in that week.  That was a team that I had been with for several years at that point and got a lot of friends.  It was a friends and family atmosphere, much similar to what I’m in right now with the guys I’ve surrounded myself with here at Stewart-Haas Racing.  To where if you can go out there and pull off the win at the Daytona 500 against the obstacles and now we’re trying to pull off this championship against the obstacle of competing against that 99 team, if we can do that, it makes it that much sweeter because the people around you are the people that helped get you here and helped actually build the team into what it is today.

It’s very similar in that aspect, and it’s much cooler knowing if we can pull this thing off, we did it as a team effort.

Q.  Could you speak to the dynamics of working for Tony as an owner as well as having to balance the driver-crew chief relationship with them?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It’s definitely got its ups and downs with that, because Tony does a really good job at separating the two on Monday through Thursday.  He puts the owner hat on and does what he has to do to try to help run the organization and those things.

When Friday through Sunday comes along, we get to the racetrack, and he switches into driver mode.  He works for me at that point, and we do a really good job separating the two to where we get to the racetrack, and we have a common goal.  We run towards that every week.

Q.  Darian, now that it’s down to the two of you guys for the championship, when you sit on the box and decide on pit calls, is it easier because all you need to do is focus on the 99, or is it more challenging because you’re still focused on winning and everybody could be doing all sorts of other things out there?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I’d say it’s more of the latter there.  We planned to go down there and do everything we can do to win the race.  We are, of course, competing against the 99 for the championship, but regardless of what else happens out there no matter where he finishes, if we can win the race, it’s a guaranteed championship for us.  Even if he finishes second and leads the most laps, we have the tiebreaker at that point with the number of wins.

So knowing that, our goal going down there is to be in front.  That is all that matters.  That matters for all 42 competitors that we’re running against, not just the one.

Other than that it comes down to if we’re running 5th or he’s running 8th, it becomes a matter of position and trying to wonder what the 99 is doing and those things.  But we have nothing to lose.  We’re coming in second.  We can’t finish any worse than second.  All we can do is go out there and shoot for the win.

Q.  That being said, how challenging has this season been?  I’ve had crew chiefs talk about there’s been so many Hail Marys thrown out there and how many risks are being taken by other crew chiefs.  How do you deal with that?  How do you not get sucked into that or how do you be a part of that and play a part of that game?  It seems there are so many different decisions being made out there, especially with the what the tire does.  How does that factor in and how does that play a role in what you decide to do?

DARIAN GRUBB:  It definitely decides that every week.  We always have those options of what you’re going to do and how bold you’re going to be as far as the calls go, but that is the nature of the sport.  The competition level has gotten so close, those calls make the difference now whether you can win or finish 10th.  That seems to pay off at times for certain people but then other weeks it doesn’t.

But thinking back to the first Phoenix race, I came in for a two-tire call and everybody else who did four.  We had a 4-second lead with 27 laps to go, and then the caution came out, And that forced us back in to the guys with four tires ran all over us and we finished seventh.  But we were going to walk away with the race on that one if things had played our way.

You have that every week.  You have those scenarios where you have to play the game.  It’s another one of those where Phoenix I waited for everybody else to pit and made a decision to do fuel only so we could make up time on the racetrack.

It’s a game everybody’s playing.  You sit there and watch the 22 car stayed out, and the two tires and all these things.  That is the topsy-turvy racing.  You see the guys from the back come to the front the way the strategy plays out.  It’s even more of a game and deciding factor every week.

That is part of what makes this job so fun.  Now you can affect the outcome a lot more with the decisions you make, and the calls you make on top of the box with your experience.  It’s just a matter now of making sure you have all the data you need to have to make the correct decisions.

Q.  How much does your stomach churn when you’re waiting to make those calls or making those calls?

DARIAN GRUBB:  A little bit.  It’s almost one of those things that that’s what we live on.  Your stomach doesn’t really churn because it’s on an adrenaline high at that point.  You’re making the call and feel like it’s 100%.  The stomach turns afterwards when it doesn’t work out or something like that.  It’s the heat of the moment.

You have to go with what your gut feeling is and what you think you need to do to try to win the race.  The best finish possible.  Then afterwards is when you have to deal with consequences.

Q.  Could you describe what your relationship is like with Tony?  How would you describe it and how would you say it’s changed or grown over the two years you’ve been working together?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I would say it’s good.  We’ve gotten to be pretty good friends on and off the racetrack.  We’ve spent a lot of time together.  We know each other a little better than we should at times.  We eat, sleep, and live together pretty much half the time at the racetrack, and try to accomplish on the racetrack.

So it’s a tough dynamic, kind of a love-hate brother relationship at times.  When you feel each of you needs to do something, but it’s the best of times when you can go out there and make things work and get on top of the victory stage and take those pictures with the trophy.

Q.  When he hired you, did he explain what he’s looking for?  Because he’s only had a few crew chiefs.  Was he looking for something specific in a personal relationship with a crew chief?

DARIAN GRUBB:  No, not really.  As I said, with me it’s more one of those things that they already had some discussions with what they were going to do.  They were looking more for the comfort level of the Hendrick chassis, and the Hendrick program and what we were doing here.  Needing somebody that knew what was going on with this side of the organization, more so than just a crew chief type or anything. (Indiscernible).

Q.  Kind of following up on that.  What can you take away from your time at Hendrick in terms of the championships won with them and what Tony’s experience has been winning the two to apply to this weekend?

DARIAN GRUBB:  I think a lot of it is just like I said before, just letting the people around you do the job that they know how to do and making sure that everybody does pull their weight and everything else should come into play.  You shouldn’t have to change your game plan to go out there and win a championship.  Because if you have set your team up properly before that, that’s what puts you in contention.  The more you have to change things to try to win it, that’s when you dig yourself a little bit of a hole.  Hopefully we’ve got a championship winning team.

I know I feel like we have that.  All the guys surrounding the 14 team, we’re really looking forward to going out there and trying to get the job done.

Q.  Tony has said over the past few weeks post race that he’s not really feeling pressure right now.  You guys have nothing to lose.  I know you said that yourself during the course of this teleconference.  Do you feel that way?  Do you not feel pressure on this?  Do you not feel like you guys have something to lose?

DARIAN GRUBB:  Not at all.  We can’t finish worse than second.  It’s the best we’ve ever run in the three years we built Stewart-Haas Racing into being a championship contender.  Now it’s about going out there and getting the job done this week.  We’ve got one person that we really have to beat to win the championship.  Other than that, we’re competing against the other 42 competitors like we always do.  We’re trying to go out there and win the race, and that controls our own destiny.

There is really no pressure.  We feel like we’ve already accomplished what we need to accomplish, but bringing the trophy home would definitely put the icing on the cake.

Q.  When you talk about that one person you have to beat.  How focused are you on the 99?  Will you be very aware of what they’re doing on pit stops and all of those other things?  Or do you have to balance that with making sure you guys run your own race?

DARIAN GRUBB:  We’re going to concentrate on running our own race.  We’re going to pay attention to what they’re doing, and they’re going to be paying attention to us.  The more you try to play the game and outrun that guy when ten other guys are going to sneak by you and pull off a Top 10, you’ll be sitting back there trying to figure out how many positions do I need to be in front of him.

We want to go for the win.  That is our goal from the time we unload.  It doesn’t matter what anybody else does at that point.

THE MODERATOR:  Darian, thank you so much for your time today.  We appreciate it, and best of luck this weekend in Miami.

DARIAN GRUBB:  Thank you very much.

In one of the closest battles in the history of the award, Grubb, crew chief for the No. 14 Office Depot/Mobil 1 Chevrolet of Stewart-Haas Racing, captured four WYPALL Wipers Crew Chief of the Race awards (which were presented after each 2011 Sprint Cup Series race as part of the WYPALL Crew Chief Challenge). There was a four-way tie for second with three weekly awards: 2010 WYPALL Wipers Crew Chief of the Year Gil Martin (No. 29 of Kevin Harvick), Alan Gustafson (No. 24 of Jeff Gordon), Jimmy Fennig (No. 17 of Matt Kenseth) and Paul Wolfe (No. 2 of Brad Keselowski).

Prior to the start of Sunday’s Sprint Cup Series race at Phoenix, Grubb was presented a check for $10,000.00 on behalf of WYPALL Wipers, proud sponsor of Saturday’s Nationwide Series race – the WYPALL 200 Presented By Kimberly-Clark Professional.

“I am thanking WYPALL on behalf of our entire team,” said Grubb. “To win this award is an honor for not only myself but for all the guys on the team. I may be the one to call the shots at critical times, but I do it with the input of my team.

“WYPALL’s products make our life easier in this sport and I want to say how much we appreciate the WYPALL Crew Chief Award. It is really special and I can’t thank WYPALL enough.”

Grubb and company are on a late-season charge, winning the last two races, at Martinsville and Texas, to pull within just three points of Chase leader Carl Edwards with just two races remaining – Phoenix and Homestead-Miami. After tasting victory in Chicago and New Hampshire to begin the 10-race Chase, Stewart slipped in the next few events, falling as low as seventh in the standings and 24 points behind.

To say Grubb and his team are on a roll now is an understatement. The win at Martinsville vaulted Stewart to within eight points of the top spot. After the Texas triumph, it was cut to three. Overall, the team has 17 top-10 results this season.

“Darian showed a cool, uncanny ability to lead this team in critical situations,” said WYPALL Wipers representative Jeff Hammond, former champion crew chief and current FOX/Speed analyst. “He and the team peaked at the right time and Darian has shown what it takes to be the WYPALL Crew Chief of the Year. To win this award is a big deal. You need to have the right team under you, the right car and the right driver – then you have to make the right calls. He has been the master at that in the Chase, withstanding the pressure of the sport, fans and Tony.”

The 36-year-old Grubb graduated from Virginia Tech in 1998 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering. After a stint with Volvo Trucks, he went to Petty Enterprises in 2000 before moving over to Hendrick Motorsports in 2003. While there, he served as an interim crew chief for Jimmie Johnson in 2006 and won two of four races, including the Daytona 500. A year later, he added another Hendrick win from atop the pit box with driver Casey Mears.

Grubb became a part of the foundation of Stewart-Haas Racing near the end of 2008. Since the team’s first season in 2009, Grubb has led Stewart to 10 victories and a spot in the Chase each year.

The 2011 WYPALL Wipers Crew Chief Challenge has been a season-long contest that has strived each week to determine the best crew chiefs in the NASCAR Sprint Cup garage.

Following each Cup race, a panel including Hammond, Sirius NASCAR Radio’s Claire B. Lang, along with Penske Racing crew chiefs Steve Addington (No. 22 – Kurt Busch) and Paul Wolfe (No. 2 – Brad Keselowski), voted to determine which crew chief demonstrated the most outstanding strategy and leadership during the race.

Each weekly Crew Chief Challenge winner was a guest on Lang’s “Dialed In” program on SiriusXM Radio (Ch. 90) at 8 p.m. EST on Wednesdays throughout the season.

“Darian and his team have been on a mission when it has counted,” said Stephanie Rossignol, Business leader for Kimberly-Clark Professional and the WYPALL Brand. “We’re extremely excited to present him this award. We look forward to giving the WYPALL Crew Chief Award every year. It’s nice to spotlight the crew chiefs and their efforts. They are genuinely proud to be a part of the program. They want to use reliable products on their cars and engines. That is why they choose WYPALL Wipers, which are used to wipe up the toughest, most stubborn messes like oil and grease.

“They can feel good about WYPALL Wipers. We are glad to show our appreciation to the crew chiefs who put our products to work each and every week.”

Grubb joins a list of prominent crew chiefs that have won the WYPALL Wipers Crew Chief of the Year including two-time winner Chad Knaus, Gil Martin, Mike Ford, Tony Eury Sr., Robbie Reiser, and Doug Richert.

THE MODERATOR We’re joined in the media center by tonight’s winning crew chief Darian Grubb. This is four now in the Chase. Talk about the momentum the team has going into the final two races.

DARIAN GRUBB: Momentum is huge, just knowing we can get it done. All the guys did a great job on pit road, all the guys in the garage. The car was fast all weekend. Tony gave us great feedback. It was a great weekend all the way around. Hopefully we can take it into the next two weeks.

THE MODERATOR We’ll take questions.

Q. You obviously had a great racecar. There were a couple times during the race Tony hauled it up on his back a little bit. Did you feel at times he was doing a little extra behind the wheel?
DARIAN GRUBB: He definitely did. Just like Martinsville when we were getting ready to go a lap down. He keeps fighting, finds that extra 3/10ths in the car. We fell back. You could tell the handling was going away a little bit. The other guys were running up on him a little bit. He got more speed out of the car and started moving forward after those guys fell off a little bit. He did a great job adapting to what the car needed.

Q. Correct me if I’m wrong. Have there been many instances this season where from start to finish of a race weekend you have been as strong as you were here?
DARIAN GRUBB: I think if you look back early in the season we kind of had some of those same stats going, we just didn’t get the finishes like we needed at the end. Las Vegas is one we qualified, stayed up front, dominated the race, had bad luck and finished second. Kick myself now, because I wish we did two tires there at the end again to pull off that win instead of Carl.

Those are points we knew we gave up early in the season. It’s good to have a weekend like this, give everybody that extra shot of confidence to know they can get it done.

The setups we have are working. Knowing we have the mile and a half come up at Homestead, hopefully we’ll take a lot of these things there and have that same speed.

Q. A question about momentum. Four wins in eight weeks. I may have this a little bit wrong, but when you substituted for Chad you had two wins with Jimmie. Does momentum mean anything to you guys?
DARIAN GRUBB: Yeah, that was two wins in four weeks. It’s definitely momentum and just the attitude that you carry. You come in with a little bit more of a pep in your step and you’re bouncing around because you know you can get it done.

Having that extra confidence means a lot, being able to go in, keep your head up, keep working on everything that you think you need to work on, work through practice plans like you think you need to. When you unload fast, you can afford to work on those things like we did this weekend.

Q. You were around the 99 it seemed like in practice and everything. Talk about the weekend with them. Was it fun? What was it like?
DARIAN GRUBB: It’s definitely fun. It’s one of those things where we go out there and have a good time with it. We do the same job week in and week out regardless of what’s going on around us. When everything happened with the 18 car, it seemed like all the media disappeared away from us. Every camera was in our stall for the first practice, but after that everybody kind of disappeared. Bob and I were joking, I’m going to get up in your face and say, What are you having for dinner tonight?

It’s fun. We have fun with it. We’re all there to get the job done. We’re not there to do the pomp and circumstance and all these other things. We want to do what we’ve got to do to make fast racecars.

Q. It seems like through the first 26 races of the regular season, it was a struggle. Once the Chase starts it’s like this light bulb moment went off. Was there one indeed once the Chase started?
DARIAN GRUBB: I really don’t think so. We had strong cars, we just didn’t get the finishes. We got in a little bit of a slump in the middle of the summer where it seemed like anything we did didn’t go right. We would have a pit call, it would bite us, next week try to do it again. Worked one week, wouldn’t work the next.

Just as the Chase started, we got the momentum on our side with the first two wins. Keep it rolling now. It’s been better ever since.

Q. Were you confident all the way there was no way Burton could make it to the finish?
DARIAN GRUBB: Pretty confident. Just the lap they pitted on, we knew they were going to have a hard time stretching it that far. At that point we were also gaining on them a second a lap. It was going to pretty much add up we were going to catch them there with one or two to go. We were trying to get everything we could get.

Q. When Burton went into the lead and Tony lost a couple of positions after the last fuel stop, you didn’t get panicked? What did you tell Tony over the radio?
DARIAN GRUBB: No, we were pretty confident that they couldn’t make it from that early. If they did, the speed was going to have to be so slow. We thought we could catch them anyway. We told him to worry about the 99 that was behind him. Hopefully it was going to work out. If nothing else, it was going to be a great points day for us and be ahead of Carl. We just have to keep fighting for all those points.

Q. I know the 99 car had a right front tire problem early on. Nobody likes right front tire problems. What were you thinking? Did you see anything at all?
DARIAN GRUBB: We had the same issues. Pretty much everybody in the garage that was running those speeds did. The tire is a good tire. That’s the limit of what you can do. I’m sure Goodyear is going to come back with something a little bit different. If not, the race is even more exciting with that. The way the tires fall off the fuel windows were getting shorted anyway. We had to make sure we take care of it. If you got really tight, you had to be even more careful.

Q. Going into Phoenix, do you look forward to something like that, where you don’t have a whole lot of notes, it’s going to be more I don’t want to say seat of your pants?
DARIAN GRUBB: We really do because it’s something where we did the tire test there, the open test. We have four full days of data that we’ve been digging through for a month and a half. We’re looking forward to going there and seeing if everything we learned while we were there still applies.

The track is going to change while we’re there with all the practice we have. We have to be smart how we adapt to those changes. Hopefully we’re going to have that speed.

THE MODERATOR Thank you very much. Congratulations.

The man next to you doesn’t need any introduction, the winner of tonight’s race, Tony Stewart. It’s his second career win at Texas Motor Speedway and fourth in the Chase. He’s three points back of leader Carl Edwards heading into the final two races.

Tony, talk about your run tonight.

TONY STEWART: I think it was all right (smiling). It was fair. We probably could have done a better job.

I don’t know what we could have done any different. We had a good car to start with and the good thing was it was close enough to where Darian was fine tuning all day. This is a race where the conditions change a bunch from the beginning of the day to the end. I was real proud we were able to adapt all day long.

I don’t know that we ever got out of the top five there the whole race. Seemed like we just kind of stayed there, stayed in the top three or four the whole day. Restarts were key obviously. But we got a really good restart that last one, had the lead coming into the pit stop. Our guys did an awesome job in the pits, got us out ahead of him. That was really the difference, was just being able to get that track position and be able to run our pace versus trying to make something happen to catch him.

THE MODERATOR We’ll take questions for Tony.

Q. Coming into this weekend, I think Carl felt like advantage them here at Texas. You come out and you do this. How big of a message is it to them that maybe what they thought was reality isn’t reality?
TONY STEWART: We tried to tell them that last week, so… It is what it is. I mean, I still stand firm that we’re not counting on them to make mistakes. We’re controlling our destiny. Today is a perfect example of that. We’re worried about what we’re doing. We’re not worried about what they’re doing. We raced our race today. We didn’t do anything worrying about what they were doing or how they were doing things. We just ran our race. That’s what we intend to do the next two weeks.

It’s theirs to lose now. But I don’t know that they have a choice now. I mean, we did what we said we were going to do. We’re going to take it if we want it. Today is a perfect example. We took five points off that deficit today. We have that ability to do that the next two weeks.

Q. Just seems like this championship Chase of yours, you’re having a lot of fun doing it. Has this been the most fun of a championship run you’ve had?
TONY STEWART: I think so. The good thing is we’ve been in this position a lot of times and this isn’t the first time we’ve been in this deal. We have that ability. Like I said, I didn’t think we belonged in the Chase to start with, I didn’t think we were a factor. What do we have to lose? We don’t have anything to lose. I don’t care about second or third in the points. After you won it, second doesn’t really matter.

To me it’s about going out, getting that championship, doing everything you can to accomplish that goal. We’re not a group that’s going to sit here obviously and say, We’ll take the easy road and settle for second. I’d rather finish sixth or seventh in points knowing that we did everything we can to win.

That’s what we’re going to do the next 14 days.

Q. Tony, I know you’re not worried about the 99 and all that. But how cool was it to battle it out with him tonight?
TONY STEWART: It shows what this Chase is going to be about. It’s a good battle right now. I mean, this was a good race today. We never really got far away from each other. At the end it was down to the two of us.

I don’t know if you’re Brian France right now, I would say he’s giddy. If not, he should be, because this is the perfect scenario. It’s the perfect storm, so to speak, going into these last two weeks. That’s what you want. This is about as exciting as it gets, to have two guys that are down to three points with two weeks ago.

Q. He drew a little bit on your picture out there.
TONY STEWART: I saw that. The bad thing is I look really bad to start with. He actually made me look a little better (smiling). I think he was actually a little too infatuated with me to be drawing on me. Kind of scares me he was so concerned about it.

Q. Tony, you talked about this a little bit, but you’ve won a championship before, two of them. Carl has been in the Chase but has not won a title. How much of an advantage, if any at all, is that for your group? How might it be an advantage?
TONY STEWART: It’s definitely an advantage. But I’m not going to tell you why ’cause that’s what I’m going to take to the next two weeks with me. We win this thing, I’ll tell you what the advantage is and why. But there’s an advantage.

Q. Tony, this is the second straight week where on restarts you were so strong coming from the outside, not in the preferred line. How gratifying is that?
TONY STEWART: Yeah, I mean, it’s very gratifying. I thought we were really strong all day on restarts. I mean, we had the one restart where we took off third there. We were two wide with Matt Kenseth going into one for the lead. We’re aggressive right now. It’s like I said, I’m taking charge and trying to control my own destiny. I think the restarts today showed what our intentions are and what we’re about for these next two weeks.

Q. Does it feel odd at all winning four races in the Chase and still being the chaser and not the guy being chased?
TONY STEWART: Not if you look at how bad a race we had at Dover. We had to win four races to make up that deficit of what we got ourselves into at the Dover race.

I’m going to be real disappointed if people are trying to make a story out of a guy that’s got four wins isn’t leading the points. It’s about 10 weeks. You got to be good for 10 weeks. You can’t just sit there and say, You can throw it all away to try to win a race and get there.

We have had to have those four wins to make up for Kansas that we missed an opportunity there, Dover that we just were bad. We’ve had to rebound from that. The good news is our four wins have carried us within three points of the lead. So I’m proud that we’ve been able to fight our way back up to it.

Q. Tony, can you remember the last time you had such a strong weekend from start to finish? You were very confident coming here. You must have felt some reinforcement getting out on the track Friday and being fast in practice and qualifying well.
TONY STEWART: We joke around about the Matt Kenseth syndrome. If he qualifies well, you know he’s going to be good in the race. That was proved today. He qualified well and he was a factor. We’re kind of in that same boat. We’re not known for qualifying. For us to qualify fifth, start that far forward, you got a sense it’s going to be a decent weekend.

The thing that we saw on the lap speeds in practice, we didn’t have that raw speed at the front of a run, but it seemed like after 10 laps we matched those guys that did have the raw speed. It seemed like by lap 15 it was kind of going the other way.

You know that this race most likely is going to be decided in a relatively long run most of the time. The good thing is it did today. Other than the traffic we struggled with at the end, we had a really good long run car and that’s what you need.

Q. Four wins in eight weeks in any Cup season is spectacular. Are you a believer in momentum?
TONY STEWART: It would be hard to not believe in it right now, to be honest. But still when we get to Phoenix next week, what happened this week and last week are over, and you still got to start that weekend from scratch.

I think our group is really good at that. But I think where the momentum carries isn’t when you start on Friday, it’s tonight through Thursday night. It’s the demeanor of the guys, the guys at the shop, how excited they are, knowing these guys are pumped up about what we got going on. When you got them working on your racecar, you want them pumped up and excited about how things are going.

But it’s back to business on Friday. The good thing at the test there, like Darian mentioned, we were really fast at the test. I’m looking forward to getting there.

Q. Last week you told Carl he better worry. He was a little more subdued in here today than last week. Any more words of wisdom for Carl Edwards?
TONY STEWART: I’m pretty sure what we did on the racetrack said everything we needed to tell him today. I mean, I don’t know how you top that. He knows. Trust me, he knows. If he’s out there drawing on me, he knows.

The fun thing is I don’t feel like I have to say anything. I feel like I already got it done.

Q. Clean, professional race today. Is that a function of the track or some guys more sobering reality this week? When you get that kind of race for you, is it a pleasure?
TONY STEWART: We’re not on a half mile anymore. You’re ripping around here, like Darian mentioned. The speeds we were running today, unbelievable how fast we run here at Texas. You’re not going to get guys doing what they did last week. Guys don’t have to get in that position of trying to take chances and put themselves in bad positions to get to the bottom of the racetrack like they had to do last week.

I think you kind of throw last week out of the equation. That’s not normal for this series. You only see it really twice a year at Martinsville. But that is what makes Martinsville exciting. At the same time that’s why I’m glad we don’t run 10 weeks at Martinsville to decide the championship because it would get ugly.

Yeah, it is nice to come here and know you’re not going to have to worry about that. Guys that had dramas last week had clean races today. It just shows that a lot of it’s a product of how fast we’re running here. Guys have a lot more respect for each other here.

Q. Carl said earlier he doesn’t want to count anybody out who is still mathematically alive no matter how far they are. Realistically, he’s the guy you’re worried about?
TONY STEWART: I’m not worried about anybody. I’m worried about what we’re doing, and that’s it. I mean, make no mistakes, understand this when you leave here, for the next two weeks, I don’t care what he does. I didn’t care what he did last week. I didn’t care what he did this week. I was worried about the 14 car and that’s all. That’s why we had the result we had today. We’re not worrying about somebody else or something else.

You’re crazy, the way the race went last week, guys having engine problems, you never can count anybody out of the equation. But I’m one of those guys, I believe there’s 35% of the things that happen on a race weekend that we can control and 65% that we can’t. All I care about is that 35% that we can control. That’s all we’re going to focus on and worry about. The rest of it we’re not going to worry about what they’re doing.

When you got two weekends in a row like we’ve had, we don’t have to do anything different. We just got to keep doing what we’ve been doing, and that’s worrying about our own racecar. Everybody else has to worry about what we’re doing, why and how.

Q. With going into Phoenix and Homestead the next two weeks, it’s been a while since you won at either of those tracks. Do you think you can get back to Victory Lane at either place?
TONY STEWART: Been a while since I won here, but we’re here tonight, aren’t we? I don’t know how you count us out. Been a long time since we won at Martinsville and here. We’ve done it two weeks in a row. Yeah, if I ever had confidence that we can do it, yeah, I feel that we can.

THE MODERATOR Congratulations, Tony.

TONY STEWART: Thank you.

He becomes only the second driver in the history of the Chase to win the first two races of the 10-race playoff for the title. It is his 41st career victory and his third time in Victory Lane at NHMS.

After qualifying 20th in the 43-car starting field for the Sylvania 300, Stewart worked his way up through the field to run consistently in the top-10. Good pit strategy and a car that continued to improve as the race wound down gave him the opportunity to take the lead and charge to the checkered flag.

With the victory, Stewart takes control of the standings by seven points with eight races remaining.

Chase race number three is set for October 2, 2011 at Dover International Speedway.

An interview with TONY STEWART and DARIAN GRUBB

KERRY THARP: We’re roll right into our post race press conference for today’s race winning team. We’re joined right now by crew chief Darian Grubb.

Darian, talk about the 14 car, two for two so far in the Chase races, coming back to New Hampshire where you had your heart broken earlier, just talk about today’s win and what it means.

Darian Grubb: It’s just a huge day for the entire 14 team and what we’ve done to battle back from all the adversity we had in the middle of the year, like you brought up and reminded me again how we ran out last year with one to go. It’s bittersweet just because we had that last year. But to come out this year, second race of the Chase, win the first two, we feel very honored and very lucky to have had two weeks go our way.

KERRY THARP: We’ll take some questions for Darian.

Q. When y’all were in the doldrums, did you sense this coming or did you have no idea when you were going to climb out of this?

Darian Grubb: It was one of those where we kind of had no idea. 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.

Q. Tony brought this up in Victory Lane. Didn’t make it clear what it was about. He spoke at some length and said, We dropped some dead weight earlier this week and it helped a lot this weekend. Can you explain what he was talking about there?

Darian Grubb: I’ve heard a lot of people talk about it, but I haven’t heard what he was talking about. I know he went and did a lot of dirt racing and had a lot of fun this week, kind of unloaded everything. Maybe it was a lot of dead weight off his mind.

Q. No personnel changes in the team?

Darian Grubb: Not that I know of. Maybe he’s talking about me and I just don’t know it yet (laughter).

Q. Can you speak to the success this team has had here this year. You come here in July, you run 1 2, win the pole, win the pole again and the race. What is it about this place that suits your style here?

Darian Grubb: We’re not really sure. We have fast race cars from the time we started at Stewart-Haas Racing. We had good, consistent weekends. Even crashed a car here at one point in practice, brought out the backup, started on pole, ran top five with it that week.

It’s just a good track for Ryan (Newman) and Tony both. Makes our job a whole lot easier at Stewart-Haas Racing. The drivers know what they need here, what the feel is they’re looking for. If they don’t have it in Happy Hour, or even the times before that, they tell us quick. We make sure we keep them filled in on what the weather is going to do for the race day so we can make sure. Tony was excited when he saw the sun come out today and it got a little slick.

Q. Obviously this became a fuel mileage issue today. Can you tell us where you were in terms of fuel at the end as opposed to a year ago.

Darian Grubb: We actually were two laps to the good at the end this time. I pushed the window from the run before longer than most people and pitted two laps later than the 33 to make sure I had a little bit of a cushion. Had good fuel mileage today. Tony did a great job saving when he needed to. I semi cut him loose, wanted him to hang with the 33 (Clint Bowyer). I didn’t think they could make it. If they did, I wanted to make sure he was close enough to make a run if they ran out. He did a great job on that. Didn’t use any more fuel than we had to. Had two laps left.

Q. Was he instructed to save fuel at any point during the last five to 10 laps?

Darian Grubb: I told him to run fast enough to keep up with the 33 but don’t push any harder than you have to. If there’s a chance you can pass him, go get it, then we’ll go into save mode after that. We weren’t going to give up a good finish to try and beat him, but then again we weren’t going to ride and save fuel to guarantee we had a good finish.

Q. Just the elation this team felt when they saw Clint run out. Did you think he had enough to go to the finish?

Darian Grubb: I thought he was going to be close. He pitted two laps before we did, we knew he was going to be at least closer than we were. If he was going to be pushing it that hard and still think he could make it, we knew we were going to be right there with him at least. Our mileage from what we were doing that window wise before that was a little bit better than what they had.

KERRY THARP: Tony Stewart has joined us. He’s today’s race winner. This is his 41st win in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, obviously his second straight win, his third victory here at New Hampshire. This is Tony’s 16th top 10 here at New Hampshire in 26 races. Good track record here. He’s the points leader by seven points over Kevin Harvick.

Tony, just talk about another strong performance today by the 14 team. You’re two for two.

TONY STEWART: Yeah, it was definitely an awesome ending to the day for sure. It was rough getting there. The first two thirds of the race I think we kind of hung around 10th or 12th, not by choice or design. Just seemed like that’s as far as we could get at the time. We were in a lot of traffic. Just seemed like a lot of guys would get stuck in traffic and kind of maintain position. There were only a couple guys you could see that really could make headway and drive through. It seemed like the closer we got to the front, the better our car drove.

We may not have been the best car at the end. Clint was just a tick better than us. I definitely did not know he was in a situation to worry about fuel. So the good thing is Darian told us we were two, three laps to the good. I got to run hard all the way to the end.

Seemed like when we got in the top five or six cars there, we had pretty good lap times. Like I say, we weren’t the fastest car, but we were solid and could maintain that pace the whole last 100 laps.

KERRY THARP: Congratulations again on the victory. We’ll take questions now.

Q. Tony, ever since you were on TV in Victory Lane, the buzz all around the track and Internet is wondering what you meant when you said, We dropped some dead weight earlier this week.

TONY STEWART: We’re just going to leave it at that.

Q. Could we ask if that was

TONY STEWART: You can’t ask anything. It is what it is. That’s all it was is what you said. That’s where we’ll leave it.

Q. Darian said there’s not been any personnel changes on the team.

TONY STEWART: No, there hasn’t.

Q. Can you talk to the success your team has had here this year.

TONY STEWART: Loudon has been awful good to us this year for sure. Ryan did a great job both of races of being fast in practice, getting the pole. I’m not sure exactly how their day shook out, what they fought during the day. But in the spring we started up front and we were able to stay up there all day, just keep working and chiseling away at it.

Today was a lot harder run at it from 20th. We just kind of stuck to the plan. We never tried anything trick to get us up there. We just stuck to the plan. There was the one stop where about half the field came in. That took us from about 10th or 12th up to 7th. May have been four or five guys that pitted there. It just seemed like we got close enough to the front at that point, that’s when we finally got in range when we could do something and make some ground.

We got back there with some cars that we just got stuck behind. We got stuck around the 56, the 31. It’s all ’cause we’re running the same speed. It seemed like once we got up there in a little better air, we were able to take advantage a little bit better.

Q. What kind of momentum do you get from the two wins? You’re a confident guy. Going into next week, what does this do for you?

TONY STEWART: It’s huge. When you talk about momentum, that racecar 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.

We’ve had one of those seasons up to the Chase where we couldn’t do anything right. I mean, we couldn’t get it clicking. We couldn’t get through all the bad luck. It seems like every week something would happen and we’d have to try to dig ourselves out of a hole the rest of the day.

I’m hoping and praying that we’re through that bad luck string now and things are hopefully going to click the next eight weeks.

Q. Darian touched on this, you said yourself a few weeks back you might be wasting one of the Chase spots. I assume you don’t feel that way now. Did you see that coming, the turnaround, or was it a matter of time?

TONY STEWART: It happened in a week. 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, Okay, this is what happened, this is what’s wrong, this is what you have to do to fix it. Like I said, we just had really weird luck this year. 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.

The potential’s been there all year. 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. Obviously, stuff like the chassis that we’re going to run through the end of the year, Darian has those planned out, but we really just focus on the day that we’re on, what we can do to make the most of that day.

Q. You talk about the bad luck you suffered. You had some here last year in this race. Given the bad karma, you’re reaping good karma from the stuff you went through. Can you speak to the irony of running this race, Clint running out of gas after you ran out last year.

TONY STEWART: Yeah, it’s amazing that it’s happened like that. But Clint was one of the first guys that called last year and, as happy as he was he won the race, he knew how disappointing it was for us. He was one of the first guys that called and said, I’m sorry about what happened. You don’t want to win them that way and you don’t want to see guys lose them that way. This is a sport that guys have a high level of respect for what happens and how it happens in this sport. To have a win get away from you that way, it’s disappointing for anybody.

Sitting up here right now, we definitely know what it was like last year for him and can sympathize about it. It shows the character he has. He was one of the first guys on pit road to get to me and congratulate me. He was laughing about it. He’s thinking about the same thing of what we’re talking about, a how ironic it was that last year the roles were reversed. Shows what character he has, he’s a great guy. Like I say, you hate to see somebody losing races that way. You love winning, but you hate to see somebody lose a race that way.

Q. Tony, on the front straightaway where you look the lead, what was the technique behind that? When did you decide that was the point to make your move?

TONY STEWART: I mean, I planned it for 280 some odd laps. I knew he was going to run out of fuel right at that moment versus just driving through him and running over him, seems like it might be an easier option to turn left and run around him (laughter). That was the strategy all along. Just had to wait for that opportunity.

KERRY THARP: No follow up for that. We’ll go ahead.

TONY STEWART: Wow (laughter). And we were doing so good in here today.

Q. The comment you made going into Chicago about your Chase chances. Stunning turnaround going from feeling like you don’t have a chance, and now you have a pretty good chance. Can you talk about that stunning reversal of fortune for you.

TONY STEWART: I wish I could say you could predict it. I wish you could see it coming in the future. The hard thing is, as much as it turned for us, you never know what’s going to happen. Like I say, we hope the next eight weeks go this way.

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. It shows that one or two bad days can put you in a bad spot pretty quick.

As much as we want to sit here and beat our chest and be proud of what we’ve done, and we are proud of what we’ve done these first two weeks, we got eight hard weeks to go here.

The celebrating isn’t going to last long. We got a lot of work to do. 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.

KERRY THARP: This is Tony’s eighth win in the Chase, ties for second with Carl Edwards.

Tony, Darian, congratulations. Thank you.

Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR

MODERATOR:
“Want to thank everyone at the Speedway. Always great to be the first bus stop on the tour and very honored to be part of the first day.

“Just to give you a lay of the land for what we have here today, obviously the more time you can spend with our folks, the better. We’ll go ahead and introduce these familiar faces. Obviously, Tony Stewart, the driver-owner here at Stewart-Haas Racing and the pilot of the No. 14 Office Depot/Mobil 1 Chevrolet; his crew chief Darian Grubb; and Ryan Newman, driver of the No. 39 U.S. Army/Tornados/Haas Automation Chevrolet; his crew chief Tony Gibson; and director of competition Bobby Hutchens.

“Tony, it’s Stewart-Haas Racing’s junior year of operation, a phenomenal freshman year, a sophomore year that also had some strong points, as well. What do you envision for the junior year of Stewart-Haas Racing?”

TONY STEWART:
“Hopefully, we just keep building on that momentum. Obviously, the first year was a learning year and a building year but, this past year, I think we all started the season a lot more comfortable in knowing what to expect. It’s definitely not easy, for sure.

“But that’s what having this group of people on stage is all about, and having Bobby (Hutchens) lead this for us, and two great chew chiefs and teammates, that’s the key ingredient you have to have. Really excited about getting the 2011 season underway. And, obviously, we have some great partners here with Mobil 1 coming on board this year, and Office Depot, who was the very first company to ever contact us wanting to be a part of this once we joined Stewart-Haas Racing. And, obviously, great partners with the U.S. Army and Tornados and Haas Automation, which really is the group that helped make all this possible. We have some great partners – Burger King, as well. There are great companies – Coca?Cola, Chevrolet – that have really helped us as a family and made us a part of their family. So we are looking forward to getting going again.”

MODERATOR:
“And Ryan, if you could add to that, specifically, to you and the No. 39 team.”

RYAN NEWMAN:
“Just continue to go build on the relationships with the team, the communication that we have, and working on our racecars and taking everything to that ‘nth’ degree of performance. Had a good year last year, and look forward to this year. I look forward to starting strong. That’s one thing we have not done as a team on the 39 side is start the season off with a good Daytona 500, so we look forward to that opportunity again this year. Had some fun testing down there with the new pavement, and look forward to the entire Speedweeks.”

MODERATOR:
“Darian and Tony, if you guys could add, from a technical perspective, new nose on our Chevy Impalas, new asphalt at Daytona and even a new fuel with ethanol. If you could talk about 2011 from a technical perspective. Darian, if you could talk about 2011 from a technical perspective.”

DARIAN GRUBB:
“It’s an exciting time for us. A few changes coming from NASCAR with the rules and new body style with the nose with Chevrolet, done a nice job on that. Excited working with Chevrolet in its 100th year of operation and being a part of its motorsports program, which has gotten so strong. The competition level is so high, we feel like we have got a leg up with our Windshear wind tunnel program, our new technical partner with Mobil 1. We feel like we have a leg up on the competition and trying to take that technology edge to the racetrack.”

MODERATOR:
“Tony (Gibson) if you can add from the 39 team’s perspective.”

TONY GIBSON:
“I think one of the biggest things we have been working on is our aero department. Chevrolet has done a great job on the new noses and spending time in the tunnel and Chevrolet does well in giving us time in the tunnel and Windshear has been a huge benefit for us. On the aero side, it’s been big and we’ve been trying to pay attention to get most out of it. And keeping the nose down with the least amount of traffic is pretty big, and working on a fuel deal. Hendrick (Motorsports) has been doing a good job and making sure we get good mileage and performance out of the engines going to the new E?15 fuel, and getting that in a bag so when you get down there, you’ve got to work with all of it. So you’ve got to dibble in all of that stuff to make sure that you’re on top of it. You can’t leave one thing unturned. So everybody at Stewart-Haas Racing has done a great job – all the engineering staff, they have done a great job staying on top of that and making sure we are getting as much as we can out of each bag.”

MODERATOR:
“And Bobby Hutchens, our director of competition. If you are to look at this from a holistic standpoint, last year at Homestead and beginning of this year at Daytona – not much off to our offseason – can you talk about the logistics of planning for a season?”

BOBBY HUTCHENS:
“Our engineering department led by Matt Borland has worked hard to get us ready for 2011. They have been out working on our speedway program and up in Michigan this weekend at a GM facility working on drivetrain parts and pieces, and then with our new sponsor, Mobil 1 and WIX Filters, technical partners, hope that helps us over the offseason to make our end product better on Sundays. As these guys said, this shop here has worked really hard to make sure our third season is our most successful season, yet.”

Q: Tony, you’ve had a chance to test at Daytona – new asphalt and everything. Sounds like the guys think the wind tunnel work has been good and cars are good. Hendrick engines, can you see any difference? Can they come with a little more horsepower this year?

TONY STEWART:
“The hard part is, we have a smaller (restrictor) plate than we’ve had at Daytona – than we have had for a while – so it’s hard to really feel it. I know they have worked hard over the offseason and I know they are excited about our package. I know we never really got in a group of more than five cars. So it was hard to compare car-to-car and that’s the only way you can really tell. They always feel like they are lazy with the restrictor plate on them, but when you get around other cars is when you notice that Hendrick horsepower. Seems like when we were able to get around some other cars, I felt like we had really good horsepower.”

Q. You were able to land an important new sponsor this year with Mobil 1. Is the economy starting to turn for you guys, making the sponsorship opportunities maybe a little easier than they were in 2008, 2009? And number two, does your affiliation with your outside affiliations, the open?wheel team, make you guys more attractive to potential partners?

TONY STEWART:
“I hope it does. Obviously, with our open?wheel teams and the (Sprint) Cup teams, I feel like we have the opportunity, especially with somebody like Mobil 1 coming on board. I know that something that was very interesting to them was the aspect of not only, ‘What we can help them develop on the Cup side, but also how does that transfer down to the grassroots racers?’ Hopefully, that does make it more appealing.

“I don’t think that we’ve turned the corner on the economy side, yet. It’s very competitive. The work off the racetrack, between the car owners and sponsors right now, it’s probably more competitive than I ever imagined it would be. And, especially nowadays, I think it’s probably harder than it’s been in the past 15 or 20 years. The good thing is, you don’t see a lot of sponsors really leaving the sport. They just have been moving around a little bit. So I think it’s a very hard time for car owners trying to figure out how they can make an attractive program and package for these sponsors to want to come over and be a part of your organization. I really feel fortunate to have somebody like Office Depot, that was here from day one, and that was when the economy started turning. They were one of the first people who wanted to be on board with us. And we had a great run with Old Spice, but having Mobil 1 on board now and having them come over in this economy is something we are really proud of.”

Q. I wanted to ask Tony Gibson: you were at DEI (Dale Earnhardt, Inc.) when they dominated the restrictor-plate tracks, and now you go with new nose and new asphalt. How much of an adjustment is it? Is the nose mainly cosmetic, or is the asphalt a big deal? What did you find and how big of an adjustment is it for you?

TONY GIBSON:
“The racetrack has a ton of grip. The old Daytona – me and Darian were talking earlier – you would run 15, 20 laps and the grip would go away and it would come down to handling and guys would get single-file. Now there’s so much grip in the racetrack, there’s some different characteristics in track to track versus Talladega, but I think it’s, for us set up?wise, it’s really, really close to Talladega. Get as much speed out of it as you can because handling doesn’t seem to be a big issue right now. I think it’s going to come down to raw speed and, if these guys can stay nose-to-tail and push each other, that will be the key. I think you’ll see a lot more side?by?side racing than you’ve seen in the last few years at Daytona, just based off so much grip in the racetrack.”

Q. Looks like you’ve (Stewart) lost some weight. If you’re in a program, could you describe that program and any other comments on fitness for the job that you do?

TONY STEWART:
“I’m definitely not the guy to be adding a lot to the fitness comments. (Laughter) I can tell you that my left hand controls the volume and the right hand controls the channel. That’s about the best workout regimen I’ve got. But I did start working out a little bit before the end of the year and changing how I eat a little bit. Actually, I wasn’t eating enough, believe it or not, and eating two meals a day.”

RYAN NEWMAN:
“We don’t believe it.”

TONY STEWART:
“I know. I know. (Laughter). Let me rephrase that – I wasn’t eating frequently enough. Went from eating two meals a day to five meals a day, a lot smaller, obviously, and now Ryan is the guy you have to ask about fitness. But no, we have lost quite a bit of weight. Haven’t lost a lot, pound?wise, but we lost a lot of fat percentage.”

Q. For Darian – how will the elimination of the catch-can man affect pit stops and the responsibilities of the remainder of the over?the?wall guys?

DARIAN GRUBB:
“I think that’s something we are all still going to learn as we go along as we get to Daytona and see what the teams have done as a pit stop scenario. We are only going to be allowed the six guys over the wall but I think you’ll be allowed to be creative in how you do that. You’ll probably see guys having multiple gas men and see some guys change the way they work with the tire carriers and the tire changers and the coordination of the pit stop. So far, the fueling process is a little bit slower than it was in the past, so that obviously changes our timing a little bit. But we are still in the learning process with that, now that we have all of the new equipment in.”

Q. The motorcoach lot has changed quite a bit. It seems like the youngsters have come along frequently. Do you guys talk about that? Do the other drivers talk about this whole kids (thing) and what you’re going through? Because your lifestyle is very unique compared to anyone else in the world with the travel and the motorcoaches and everything. Do you share stuff and talk about the kids when you’re hanging out?

RYAN NEWMAN:
“We have, more recently. Just like testing last week, (I) talked to Jimmie (Johnson) about it. He’s further ahead, so I can learn from him. Jamie McMurray and myself were about the same time going through the same thing, so we can compare what’s right and wrong and women and kids and everything else. (Laughter).

“I guess, ultimately, you might see some more trailers behind golf carts in the motorcoach lot. That’s about it. We are just adapting to it. It’s a big change for us and I think it’s weird if you look back at the history of the sport. I’ve heard the stories of the Petty’s and all that stuff back in the day. It’s like it skipped two or three generations, it seemed, and now there’s a big influx of mass production of kids, it seems. (Laughter). There are guys who are doubling up quicker than we ever thought. So it’s different, for sure. It changes the conversation from set-ups to baby cribs and things like that.”

Q. Darian, can you talk about how finding speed is more of a nuance or an “Ah-hah” moment?

DARIAN GRUBB:
“I think that just comes as a property of the NASCAR rule book now. Everything has gotten to be such a tight box that we are all competing in. The performance level of every team is very high. It’s all about the fine details, now, and the hours that you put in at the shop. The detail work is where you’re going to find the speed, now. If somebody could find that big ‘aha’ moment, they will win two or three races, but everybody will be right back on top of them. It’s pretty easy to figure out when they are working two or three feet away from you in the garage. It’s hard to keep a secret when it works that tightly, the whole network. But it’s something we are really happy about because it gives us a chance to go through and show that detail and the expertise of the Stewart-Haas employees and be able to show that at the racetrack.”

Q. With all of the years you’ve (Hutchens) spent going from one season to the next, how can you compare what it’s like now to transition and look forward to the next year versus the way it might have been all those years ago?

BOBBY HUTCHENS:
“Many years ago, we might spend 20 or 30 days (testing) between Talladega and Daytona. Of course, the last few years, we have not been there at all. Going back there three days this year brought back memories of years gone by. But the way we have it now, at least the folks in the shop and especially the guys who travel on the road, have a bit of a life in the offseason where, before, we were gone probably more back in those days during the offseason than we were even when we traveled normally to the races. So from my perspective, I like to see the no-testing during the offseason.”

Q. I guess for Darian – as the changes are going more toward “green” fuels, is there much difference in the performance of the vehicle, and does it create any ?? what kind of work do you have to put in to make any kind of adjustments? Or do you notice much of anything in the way of difference?

DARIAN GRUBB:
“It’s more of the fueling system that’s come into play, since there’s no more catch can. The biofuel addition – that we think is something very good for NASCAR. We are all looking forward to taking that next step and going all the way to E?85 at some point. Partners like Chevrolet and Mobil 1, everybody is on the edge of that green initiative and we are proud to be a part of that.

“So far, we have not really seen that much of a performance change. It’s a little bit more power but a little bit less as far as the fuel mileage goes. So it’s going to be something that’s even through the entire field and not going to make a major change. We have had a lot of testing in?house and also with outside suppliers, determining how the material compatibility is with the alcohol content and the fuels and those things. Everybody has pretty much done the homework. We don’t think there are going to be any hiccups and we are ready to go to the racetrack with it.”

Q. Down there in testing, was there any noticeable characteristic of the new nose that jumped out at you right away, or was it pretty much business as usual?

TONY STEWART:
“I think, for the most part, it was still business as usual. It didn’t seem to be a big balance change and, like Tony Gibson mentioned earlier, there’s so much grip on the racetrack that I’m not sure we know how much change in aero balance it will be. It seems like, with the smaller plate, it was real easy. It was hard to get to the back of guys’ bumpers, and the only way you could do that was to get the guy in front to actually back up to you, and he either had to lift down the throttle or drag the brake pedal while he was still on the gas to back up to a guy to get in that push situation. That was the only noticeable change, I felt like. It seemed like opposite polarized magnets. When you would get so close, finally it would just push you away before you could get to the guy’s bumper. It took more effort to actually get the two cars hooked up together.”

RYAN NEWMAN:
“And I don’t think that we’ll see all of the things that are different in the nose until we get to a different track that’s the same. So, for instance, Phoenix, our second race, mostly from a bump standpoint, the way the splitter touched the racetrack, it’s going to be different this year in how we control that because this nose here seems to be more of a direct connect from the body to the racetrack than with the old splitter stays that we had that were a little bit more forgiving, I think.”

Q. We hear all sorts of crazy stories about Daytona cars, the insane level of detail and preparation that goes into them, bolts being ground off the bottom and decals painted instead of stickered. How much work goes into a Daytona 500 versus a regular-downforce car?

BOBBY HUTCHENS:
“Our cars were started in the August and September (2010) timeframe, and there’s been somebody working here pretty much every day on those cars. And most of the things you alluded to, those are things that we do and, like Darian mentioned earlier, you’re going to get down there and the small details that we are taking care of here by the body shop, by our fab shops, those guys taking possession and ownership of their particular area and rubbing on it a little harder than the next guy is going to make the difference when you get to Daytona. So that is a big, big thing that is going to happen because the cars, and the rules, as Darian stated, are so even.”

Q. NASCAR is discussing setting qualifying order based on your fastest practice times. Is that going to change your strategy of how you attack a race weekend? Are you going to come more focused on your qualifying practice speed to make sure you get that good qualifying draw?

DARIAN GRUBB:
“I think, for myself, what Tony and I have been through the last two years, we learned a lot about each other and the styles of the racetrack and what we need to have. We have done better, personally, as a 14 team by starting out in race trim, letting Tony go out and get a feel for the track and tires. We have had a lot of changes happen between races and tires and aero setups between the wings and the spoilers and all those things.

“Now, we are going to be settling into a new change, once we get that comfort level of where we know we need to be. We might be able to go and spend more time on qualifying. But we personally like to spend a little more time in race trim, get a feel and lay of the land and make sure everything is comfortable and right, and then we know a set change we can make to the qualifying trim that usually puts us higher on the board when we do that. If you’re not close with your race set-up, you are not going to be close at all with your qualifying set-up. So the more we can know the shift and balance we can have, we feel like we can be stronger doing that.”

Q. As a follow?up on that, one of the other things we are seeing is Saturday-morning qualifying sessions. Talk about how that plays into it, whether it’s just how that plays into it on those weekends. Or, it looks like we are going to be back and forth on it, how that plays into your attack of practice sessions.

DARIAN GRUBB:
“As the schedule comes out, it’s definitely going to change a few things, the way we approach the practice sessions, we have two sessions on Friday at a couple of the racetracks, already, and then a Saturday qualifying. It’s going to be a little tougher from the driver’s standpoint more than it is the crew because we are still going to go in and do everything we can do to make the car as fast as possible for both scenarios. It will be up to Eddie (Jarvis, business manager) and Mike (Arning, director of public relations) to get Tony there on time for qualifying and out of bed and get the sleep out of his eyes. That’s going to be probably a big change on a lot of those guys. I don’t think it’s going to give us an advantage because we have the veteran drivers who can be able to step into the car and make the same lap they made yesterday and trying to figure it out and have an hour break before they go qualify. I think we will be really good at that.”

Stewart scored the second of his two career Sprint Cup wins at Martinsville on April 2, 2006. It was a rare sight, for since 2003, the only other active Sprint Cup drivers to visit Martinsville’s victory lane have been Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Denny Hamlin. (Rusty Wallace, now retired and a NASCAR analyst for ESPN, scored his last Sprint Cup win at Martinsville on April 18, 2004.)

Gordon, a four-time Sprint Cup champion, turned Martinsville into Gordonville by sweeping the track’s two Sprint Cup races in 2003 and again in 2005. That run helped burnish Gordon’s legacy at the .526-mile oval, for he logged three previous Martinsville wins back in the late ‘90s.

Gordon’s domination, however, gave way to that of his Hendrick Motorsports teammate. Johnson, now the four-time and reigning series champion, gave a glimpse of his future stranglehold on the paperclip-shaped track when he won on Oct. 24, 2004. Since then, Johnson has scored five more Martinsville wins, including three straight from October 2006 through October 2007, and then back-to-back triumphs in October 2008 and March 2009.

But just as Johnson usurped Gordon’s dominance at Martinsville, another young hotshot appears to be doing the same, making sure Johnsonville is known only for sausage.

Virginia native Denny Hamlin is the current King of Martinsville. He broke Johnson’s win streak when he took home one of Martinsville’s prized grandfather clocks after winning the March 2008 Sprint Cup race. And much like Johnson has done in the past, Hamlin is poised to make it three straight Martinsville wins, as he won last year’s October visit to the southern Virginia short track before returning this March for the track’s spring race and winning it. A Hamlin victory in Sunday’s Tums Fast Relief 500 would surprise no one.

That being said, Stewart knows what it’s like to have the upper hand at Martinsville. In addition to his two wins, he has three poles and holds the track qualifying record of 19.306 seconds at 98.083 mph, set in October 2005. He also has eight top-fives, 13 top-10s and has led a total of 1,193 laps in 23 career Sprint Cup starts at Martinsville. Stewart’s laps led tally ranks him third among active drivers, behind only Gordon (2,888) and Johnson (1,551).

The driver of the No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing is now a 12-year Sprint Cup veteran, and after logging 5,796 racing miles at Martinsville, Stewart knows a thing or two about the subtleties of the track’s tight and fast layout.

Come Sunday, expect to see the usual suspects up front, and expect Stewart to be one of them.

If you doubt the man, however, don’t doubt the car. The No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice Chevrolet Stewart will use to cut 19-second laps around Martinsville is the same car that led 100 laps and was poised for victory five races ago at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in Loudon. There, Stewart was a lap away from victory before his fuel cell ran dry, delivering a heartbreaking 24th-place finish.

Now that strong racecar is back in Stewart’s capable hands, at a track where Stewart has been the lone ranger in defeating the trio of Gordon, Johnson and Hamlin. So, if you’re looking for fast relief from the same old, same old, look to Stewart first before you look for your Tums.

TONY STEWART, Driver of the No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing:

How do you beat the Jimmie Johnson and the No. 48 team when they’ve been so good for so long?

“The variable that people don’t take into account is that the technology changes every week, and it’s not something that’s huge and noticeable, but things constantly get better. You’ve got engineers and dynos and wind tunnels and simulation programs and all that stuff that changes week to week. So, it’s not that simple. It’s a lot more complex than that and as the sport evolves and setups change, you have to change with it, and that’s something the No. 48 team has been really good at – being able to adapt.

“As good as the ‘48’ team is, they’ve still had a lot of luck go their way, too. You have to be good, but you’ve got to have some luck on your side at the same time, because there’s a lot more there that can go wrong than can go right.”

When a guy like Johnson dominates, be it at a track like Martinsville or in the Chase for the Championship, he gets booed. Do you have a theory as to why he gets that kind of reaction from the fans, but is so respected by his competitors?

“It’s because he doesn’t do anything on the racetrack that makes them mad other than win. It’s hard to not like Jimmie. He’s personable. I get along with him great. Every time I won a race last year, he was one of the first people to send me a text message congratulating me, and I think that shows Jimmie’s personality and character. He’s just not one of those guys that goes out there and gets into guys and gets into trouble with guys on the racetrack that creates some of that animosity that the fans have sometimes.”

You’ve had success at Martinsville and a period where you were always a threat to win. What’s that like?

“You can have it, for sure. It’s knowing that feel, it’s finding that combination that works, and the next time you come back to that track you know what that feel is like and you know what you’re looking for in practice for it to be good in the race. During the race, the track changes quite a bit, but you know when you kind of have that rhythm. You have the timing of what it was like, you just know what that feel is in the car that you’re looking for, not necessarily to be good in Happy Hour as much as to be good for the race. When you’ve had a good weekend, the next time you go back it’s just easier to try to go back and mimic that feel. That’s why when guys hit on something they’re normally good for a while until the package changes quite a bit, and then once that changes, you have to learn a different feel. Normally for a while you can have that, and different guys, if you look over the history, have kind of had runs at it. It seems like whether it’s a three or four or five-race period, guys get that feel of it and know what that tire likes, what the chassis combination likes at that time, and they kind of have that and they know how to adapt to it.”

What do you like about racing at Martinsville?

“It’s still that old short track feel. That’s what I like. We run a lot of 1.5-mile tracks during the year and it’s the only place that races like this. We’ve got two half-mile tracks that we race on. This one’s quite a bit different than Bristol, and that’s what makes it fun. You can out-brake guys and you can run the outside if you get a shot. It’s racing the way we all grew up racing.”

Short tracks seem to suit you well. Would you like to see more short tracks added to the schedule?

“Well, they haven’t built any new ones yet. Everybody that wants to build a mile-and-a-half track are the ones we look at and wonder why they’re doing that, especially when Martinsville is as good a race as it is and Richmond and Bristol are as good as they are. You have three of the best tracks on the circuit, but everybody wants to build a mile-and-a-half track and put grandstands down the front of it and not put as many seats as you can around places like Martinsville, Richmond or Bristol. You can get just as many people around a smaller track and have more room to park them and everything else. I’m all for it. I’m sick of seeing guys build mile-and-a-half tri-ovals. Be creative, be unique. Build something that is your own. Don’t copy somebody else’s track.”

In last year’s spring race at Martinsville you finished third for what was the first top-five finish for Stewart-Haas Racing. In your first year as a driver/owner, how big was that race for you?

“It was a good feeling to get our first top-five at Martinsville. To go there that early in the year and get our first top-five – it was a big momentum boost for the whole organization. The same day that we got our first top-five here, Ryan (Newman, teammate) ended up eighth, but he charged from the back twice to do it. Even though he didn’t get the limelight at the end of it, he probably had more of an impressive day with his run then we had with ours. I think we both left there with the feeling that we had two great race teams that were able to be competitive and be able to fight back and have good runs.”

DARIAN GRUBB, Crew Chief of the No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice Chevrolet Impala for Stewart-Haas Racing:

You grew up in the tiny town of Floyd, Va., about an hour northwest of Martinsville. How often did you go to Martinsville as you worked your way up the racing ladder?

“I actually never went to a Sprint Cup race until I started working in Cup. I went to a lot of Late Model races there from about 1991 on through 2000 working on cars that were racing, but that’s really the only time I made it there. I’ve never sat in the stands there. I’ve always been in the garage working.

“I worked with Johnny Rumley, Satch Worley and Jeff Agnew was probably the biggest name driver I worked with for a long time. I worked for him for about 10 years. Lots of memorable moments from that. I think it was my first year at Martinsville and I was there with Satch Worley and we were in practice and his steering wheel came off. He didn’t check it after he had gotten back in the car before going out on the track again. He absolutely destroyed that car and he came back to the pits with the steering wheel in his hands and said, ‘Guess I should’ve put this on a little better.’ That was my introduction to Martinsville. There were like 160 Late Models that showed up, and of course we didn’t make the show because we crashed.”

Do you have a lot of family and friends who come out to Martinsville to see you and take in the race?

“I have a lot of friends around that area. My family is really close to Martinsville. Everybody is probably within an hour-and-a-half of that area. A lot of friends come down and see me, and even when they can’t make the race, it sparks some memories and we’ll get on the phone and call each other. It’s cool to see everybody and catch up on old times.

What goes into making a car good at Martinsville, beyond making sure the steering wheel is on tight?

“It’s all about the weight distribution and then comfort for the driver – getting everything exactly the way the driver would like to have it. His preference for every little detail from entry to the center of the corner and exit and braking, the throttle application – everything has to be just right, because Martinsville is all about rhythm. Rhythm is what’s going to give you a chance for the pole. Making sure everything is right and making sure you can get every little piece out of the car. In order to go as fast as possible, you have to get the most out of everything that you can get. Every foot of the straightaway and all through the corners – it’s tenths of seconds here and there that really add up. The whole field is probably separated by two- to three-tenths of a second.”

Qualifying up front at Martinsville is obviously important. But how do you balance using your practice time to focus on making two qualifying laps when you also have to prepare for a 500-lap race?

“Luckily, you don’t have a whole lot of changes between qualifying and race setup. It’s more a few things you do for tweaks of speed here and there. Everything else is still about driver comfort, because if he’s comfortable in the racecar, he’s going to be comfortable for qualifying. You just add a few more things to it to get a little more speed out of it. You make the car a little more aggressive, basically. It’s a little more on edge in qualifying, but the driver can drive through that. When you get into race setup, it’s hard to pass, so you have to make him even more comfortable inside the car to make sure he can run his line so that he doesn’t get pushed out of the way very easily and doesn’t get pressured by somebody behind him, because the only way you can really pass there is by doing a bump-and-run. You need to get somebody else off their rhythm to get around them.”

Beyond a good starting spot, what does a good qualifying position give you at Martinsville?

“It’s huge there. The pit road is very tight and it’s very narrow. You have a lot of fighting going on to get into your box. The boxes are very short and you can’t get the angles you need to get in the box, do your pit stop, and then get back out of the box very cleanly if someone’s in front of you. It’s tough all the way around there. The pit crews – if you get too close to the wall you can’t get the jack up because you can’t move the handle as far down. And then the cars racing by you, they’re going to be four feet away because the wall is that close. It’s a hairy predicament all the way around. So, the better you can do in qualifying, the better pit selection you can get and help yourself out in some of those areas.”

How stressful is it for you as a crew chief, as you’re the one who has to call the driver into and out of the pit box?

“It’s not that big of a deal for the driver. It’s more for the crew guys because they have to get around the car and give it three-feet of room as he’s coming into the box, but there might be someone else coming into the box in front of him that they have to watch for. I have to give them the heads up as to who’s coming around them. There are a lot of things happening on pit road in a very short amount of time.”

In attendance:
TONY STEWART:                Driver/owner, Stewart-Haas Racing
DARIAN GRUBB:                 No. 14 team crew chief, Stewart-Haas Racing
BOBBY HUTCHENS:           Director of Competition, Stewart-Haas Racing
REBECCA RAHAIM:           Global Brand Manager, Mobil 1

MODERATOR:

“There’s obviously a big sponsorship announcement here.  I’ll introduce the key participants here.  Darian Grubb, making his way to the stage.  He’s the crew chief.  Bobby Hutchens, who is the Director of Competition here at Stewart?Haas Racing. And Rebecca Rahaim, who is with Mobil 1.  She’s the brand manager.  And, of course, Tony Stewart, driver/owner, and a winning one at that.  Congratulations on the win at the Auto Club Speedway.

“A little bit of housekeeping before we get going.  All of the participants here will make some remarks.  We’ll have some informal questions. There will be opportunities to take photos.  There will also be some questions there from you folks, and then there will also be opportunities for one?on?ones as soon as the formal part of this is over, as formal as you can be, in this.

“And, again, thank you all for being here.  And this is an important part of the racing business and the industry for Tony Stewart, for all these folks here, and for everybody here in the industry.  So it’s exciting to have this opportunity to be here.

“Now, Tony you’ve said all along, when it came to Stewart?Haas Racing’s sponsorship search, you would let everyone know at the same time, and that time appears to be now.  So tell us what’s going on here today.”

TONY STEWART:

“Yeah, we have something to talk about.  So those of you that love to ask me about it, today’s that day, obviously.

“ExxonMobil has been a part of motorsports for over 30 years now.  They’re very committed to excellence and winning.  And we’re very excited to announce that we signed a multi?year deal with Mobil 1 to be on the No. 14 Chevrolet as a co?sponsor with Office Depot.

“So very excited about the opportunity to work with Mobil 1 and have a partner that is so committed to not only the brand marketing but at the same time making our cars and our program better and giving us a better opportunity to win.  So very excited about that.”

THE MODERATOR:

“Well, Rebecca, Mobil 1 has a long and successful history in all of, not all, but a lot of motorsports, including Formula One.  How does this relationship with this team fit into your overall plans?”

REBECCA RAHAIM:

“Yes, thank you, Steve.  Well, first of all, it’s great to be here today.  ExxonMobil is thrilled about our new relationship with Tony Stewart and Stewart?Haas Racing.

“By sponsoring a two?time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion, we are able to build on Mobil 1′s official motor oil of NASCAR status.  And we are showing our continued commitment to NASCAR today.

“Mobil 1, as Tony said, has a long tradition of partnering with world?class teams around the world, and we’re proud of our new association with one of NASCAR’s top drivers.  And we look forward to helping Stewart?Haas Racing secure a Sprint Cup Series championship and add to the list of successful teams that Mobil 1 has supported for more than 30 years.

“NASCAR continues to provide a strong platform to demonstrate that Mobil 1 technology offers ultimate vehicle performance and the advanced protection against engine?wear for both extreme and everyday driving conditions.  Whether you’re a NASCAR driver on the track or race fan traveling to the track.

“For those who are not familiar with the brand’s long?time involvement in racing, I want to point out Mobil 1′s history in motorsports officially began in 1978 with the sponsorship of Williams Formula One race team.

“So, Tony, we’re thrilled to have you represent our brand.  Everyone knows about your on?track success.  And you deserve credit for your achievements as a team owner as well, given your success in building one of the sport’s top teams in such a short period of time.

“It’s surely a testament to your drive and determination both on and off the track, and we look forward to being your technical partner and providing Mobil 1 technology and engineering support to Stewart?Haas Racing.

“Additionally, we’re excited about welcoming your teammate Ryan Newman back to the Mobil 1 racing family.  Mobil 1′s been the official oil of NASCAR for eight years, since 2003, and more than half of all NASCAR teams are using Mobil 1 technology.

“So we’re looking forward to continuing our commitment with NASCAR and our new partnership with Tony Stewart and Stewart?Haas Racing.”

MODERATOR:

“Thank you, Rebecca.  Bobby Hutchens, Director of Competition here.  We know that you have a close relationship, a technical partnership and alliance with Hendrick Motorsports.  As a customer of Hendrick, how are you able to keep what you learned from your relationship with Mobil 1 proprietary to Stewart?Haas Racing?”

BOBBY HUTCHENS:

“We’ll continue to have a relationship with Hendrick Motorsports, receiving world?class engines as we have for the past two seasons.

“We have a technology agreement between ourselves and Mobil 1.  And we have a technology group here led by Matt Borland, who will be working hand in hand with the folks at Mobil 1 in their R&D department.  And from that, those proprietary combinations and whatnot that we will be using here will be done at Stewart?Haas only, in our engines, in our cars.

“And that technology will be proprietary to us.  At the same time, we have to respect the proprietary information that HMS (Hendrick Motorsports) has also.  So all of our cars next season will be running with Mobil 1 oil.”

MODERATOR:

“Thank you, Bobby.  Darian, congratulations on a win, but you guys don’t look back, you look forward.  To that point you were an engineer at Hendrick Motorsports.  Also worked as a crew chief on occasion.

“Now as a full?time crew chief here, we work in a sport where the entire field sometimes is separated by less than half a second.  This relationship with Mobil 1, you guys are always talking about 100th or a tenth of a second.  Is this something that can help performance, aside from just being a partner financially?”

DARIAN GRUBB:

“Absolutely.  The technology that ExxonMobil and the Mobil 1 brand brings to the sport goes right along with all the technology we have to have to be able to perform every weekend.  Every aspect of the racecar and every moving component has to function to its top capability to be able to be competitive against the competition.

“And with the diverse motorsports background that ExxonMobil and the Mobil 1 brand has and what they cover and the background they have in every area, it’s a very comforting fact for me to know that I can look to these technology partners and know that I can get the answers that I need to help make that racecar faster.

“It’s like Bobby said with the Hendrick Motorsports program we have for the engines; the only thing that’s going to change there is lubrication, and we feel we have the best technology partner available for that.”

MODERATOR:

“Thank you very much, Darian.  Well, it wouldn’t be a press conference without an unveiling.  I’d like to invite Tony and Rebecca to do the honors by one of the cars and Darian Grubb and Bobby Hutchens will unveil the other one.  We’ll give you guys time to set up to get the money shot, as it were.

“After we get the shots, we’ll open it up for some questions.”

Q.  Tony, what does this say about your organization, which is only in its second year, to be able to land another new sponsor?

TONY STEWART:

“The largest company in the world, too.  To have a company of this caliber believe in Stewart?Haas Racing and believe in our program and what we’re trying to accomplish, personally, it feels great for me.  Just having their confidence and their support and knowing that we have a partner that has such a great ability to make our program that much better is exciting.  It’s an exciting time for us.”

Q.  You took over ownership of a race team in a bad economic time.  Can you talk about how difficult it has been to line up sponsorship and maybe provide details about this particular search, the time it took to put it together, based on the economy, and how many teams are vying for sponsorship?

TONY STEWART:

“I don’t know how many other teams are.  I know we’ve worked really hard this year with our staff.  But it is. It’s a hard time right now, a hard economy.

“But, you know, this is still a series that doesn’t stop, no matter how bad the economy is.  These teams are going to push forward and there’s partners obviously like Mobil 1 that know how important not only NASCAR racing is, but racing is in general to their product.

“So it brings a lot of pride knowing how hard the economy is right now and how tough the times are to be able to bring Mobil 1 into Stewart?Haas Racing and hopefully the comfort that they’ve given us at this time of the year with helping us with our partnership, hopefully we can return that favor to them.”

Q.  Rebecca, when it became clear your relationship with Penske was going to end, did you guys always intend to look for another team in the series to remain with, and what led you to Stewart?Haas?

REBECCA RAHAIM:

“Thank you for that question.  As you may or may not know, Mobil 1 has been the official motor oil of NASCAR since 2003.  And we’ve had an ongoing commitment to NASCAR.  So we’ve always been interested in continuing with the team.

“I think why Tony Stewart and Stewart?Haas Racing, winners like winners.  Tony Stewart is a two?time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion.  Mobil 1 is the world’s leading synthetic motor oil brand.  So it’s a natural fit.  We’re really excited to be with Stewart?Haas Racing and continuing our commitment to NASCAR.”

Q.  Darian or Bobby, what leeway do you have with oil? Where does oil stand in finding developments via the sponsorship you can use in the race car? How much does it help to have a sponsor technologically, as you were mentioning, that is an oil product?

BOBBY HUTCHENS:

“I think it’s very important.  From our standpoint they have the largest oil manufacturer in the world at our disposal to work with our technology group, to be able to interface with those guys, not only from the oil in the engine, but from the greases in the wheel bearings and the greases in the engine and transmission.

“At the end of the day I hope it’s going to be a competitive advantage from what we’re plotting out going forward. Hopefully in 2011, you’ll see a big difference in our performance.”

Q.  Specifically, what leeway do you have with oil?

BOBBY HUTCHENS:

“From my perspective we have a lot of leeway. The biggest thing is durability, I guess, from a performance aspect making sure we’re able to compete for the 500 miles.”

Q.  Relationships with technical companies like Mobil 1 is a two?way street.  Bobby, how much comes to you from the R&D department at Mobil 1, and maybe how much goes back from you guys to the Mobil 1 to enhance the product? Just talk about the relationship of that boards and how that two?way street works and how much does it favor one way or the other?

BOBBY HUTCHENS:

“Hopefully it’s a 50/50 deal that we’re able to give back as much as they’re able to help us.  We’re already ongoing with some projects right now for next season as far as doing some R&D testing from both sides.  They have some blends and whatnot that they want us to look at.  We’re going to be looking at wear on parts and pieces.

“So hopefully that will give them information to be able to go back and blend their oils and lubricants better for the general population.”

REBECCA RAHAIM:

“I agree with that.  It’s definitely a give?and?take and a learning process.  Mobil 1′s in motorsports for a reason.  It’s a key part of our technology development program.

“So working with NASCAR and Formula One or any of the other series that we’re involved with, it’s a two?way street.  There’s a lot of learning going back and forth.  We work with a lot of the original equipment manufacturers for the same reason.  We’re all looking to improve our performance, our technology, whether it’s on the racetrack or off the racetrack.”

Q.  Tony, is the 14 car now totally sold as far as primary sponsorship for 2011, or are you still looking for more?  Can you update us on the 39 as well? Are Army and Tornados returning?

TONY STEWART:

“Everything is good on the 39 car there with Tornados and U.S. Army coming back.

“We’re in good shape on the 14 car now.  This has fulfilled what we’re looking for to fill the void for Old Spice next year.  It allows us to now put that project behind us.  We’re still always looking for new partners.  You never stop in that category.  You’re always looking to bring new people into the sport and even if it’s not at a co?primary position, you’re always looking for associate sponsors.

“So the search, necessarily, isn’t over.  But this does fill the void from the Old Spice brand leaving at the end of the year.  On Ryan’s car, we’re still looking for some associate sponsorship also, but we’re very happy that Tornados and U.S. Army are coming back again.  Exciting to have new partners that have come into the sport that are excited and happy with what we’re doing and that want to return.

“So very happy with the way things are going right now.”

MODERATOR:

“Thank you.”