Ryan Newman has had a solid, if mostly quiet 2011 season.
Now in his third year at Stewart-Haas Racing, the Indiana native moved into the top in the NASCAR Sprint Cup standings during the second week of the season and has not left there, despite some ups and downs along the way.
If history is any indication, Newman will be one of the favorites to win Saturday night’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway. Newman’s most famous of his 14 career Sprint Cup race victories came in the 2008 Daytona 500, and this year, he led the most laps in the 500, only to get caught in a crash not of his own making.
Newman even likes the two-car-tango form of drafting, something not all of his fellow drivers embrace.
“The tandem drafting is something I look forward to, much more so than the way it used to be, racing-wise,” said Newman. “So we’ll see if we can have some fun and put on a good show. It’ll be interesting to see what the weather lets us do here in the next couple of days. I don’t know how much track time we’re going to get. But either way, I’m sure we can put on a good show for the fans on Saturday night.”
Right now, Newman is in a tough place in terms of points. He’s 10th in the standings with 10 races to go in NASCAR’s 26-race Sprint Cup regular season. The man chasing him is Newman’s friend and boss, Tony Stewart, who ranks 12th in points, 15 back of Newman. Neither of the SHR teammates has won a race, but 11th-place Denny Hamlin has, which puts him in a good spot to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup.
Still, Newman is confident about his prospects on Saturday night.
“We led the most laps in the Daytona 500, which was a great feat for us as a team,” said Newman, who has also won ARCA and IROC races at Daytona.
“It was the first time for me at a restrictor-plate track (leading the most laps) and the first time for me at SHR,” he said. “And we feel we were four laps away from winning that race which, if you equate it to math, time-wise it’s two-and-a-half minutes. To be two-and-a-half minutes away from something so big and get crashed is pretty disappointing. It happens, and it seems like it’s happened to us a lot, but we still left Daytona knowing we had something and we were in the mix to bring home the trophy, and that was a big deal for us.”
So now, the challenge for Newman is to get it done on Saturday night.
“Daytona is a great place to race,” he said. “I’ve always said that I don’t enjoy the restrictor-plate races as much as I do the non-restrictor-plate races, but I understand it’s a part of our sport. It’s not restrictor-plate racing the way that it used to be, where everybody is four-wide, four-deep and you are stuck in New York City traffic. That’s what I didn’t like from my standpoint.”
Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
