I'm Just Sayin'...
By Matthew Scott
Monday, June 30, 2008

If it weren't for bad luck... you know the rest.

Tony Stewart should go to Home Depot, buy a ladder, and then walk under it. He should buy a dozen black cats and let them cross his path all day long. He should break every mirror in his house. He should even change his number to "13." Seriously, Smoke should surround himself with every conceivable bad luck charm, omen, and superstition imaginable. At this point, what harm could it cause? It's not like Stewart's luck could get much worse.

By most reasonable expectations, Tony Stewart's 31-race winless streak should have come to an end Sunday at New Hampshire. Despite starting 28th, Stewart made his way to the front with apparent ease, led 132 laps, and was just 29 laps from Victory Lane. Then, the sad tale that is Stewart's 2008 Sprint Cup season - or at least a microcosm of it - unfolded. As Stewart and the other contenders pitted, a handful of pretenders stayed on the race track. Making matters worse, Stewart's crew opted to change right-side tires while the other cars on pit road settled for fuel only, thus dropping him even further in the standings. The green waved on lap 278, and six laps later, with Stewart fittingly in 13th place, rain began to fall. Race over. Streak continues. Frustration mounts.

But Stewart is not the only multiple champion who seems a bit snake bitten. Sunday's race was exactly the kind of situation Jeff Gordon took full advantage of last season, a season in which he was arguably as dominant as he's been in any of his championship runs with the exception of his 13-win gem in 1998. In fact, it was just last June at Pocono where Gordon and crew chief, Steve Letarte, played the fuel/rain game to perfection to nab a hard-earned, if not necessarily well-deserved win. At New Hampshire, Gordon, like Stewart, did not start up front, but steadily made his way forward, then settled in for what seemed certain to be another Top 5 result. But a trip to pit road and some untimely weather instead relegated Gordon to an 11th place finish.

Gordon, 11th. Stewart 13th. Kurt Busch, Michael Waltrip, and J.J. Yeley, 1-2-3. Congrats if you picked that trifecta.

For his part, Stewart remained remarkably calm in the aftermath of this latest disappointment. No ranting or raving, no storming from the garage area into the solitude of the hauler. Instead, he spoke coolly and evenly, almost as if he were resigned to his fate.

"This has been the oddest year for this race team," Stewart said. "It's the worst string of bad luck I've ever seen. But a percentage of this industry is luck, and you can't change it."

Perhaps not the fire-snorting, post-race Stewart many have come to expect in such circumstances, but maybe the toll from a decade of putting his emotions on display have created a more introspective Tony. His post-New Hampshire comments seem almost Zen-like in their simplicity.

"I have some of the best guys in the garage on this team," Stewart said. "We'll keep plugging away and we'll get this thing turned around. We're racers. That's what we do."

index