LOUDON, N.H. -- Moral victories may not exist in motor racing, but the points Tony Stewart, Darian Grubb and their Stewart-Haas Racing team scrambled to save Sunday in the Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway are definitely huge in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

"When we get to the end," Stewart-Haas competition director Bobby Hutchens said, "we may look back and think that that was the moment that may have made the difference. Is it a bad day? Yeah, but it's not a total loss."

Fixing loose ends

Tony Stewart lost valuable track position as his crew fixes a rear axle that came apart.

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Stewart, who led the points for the final 13 weeks of the regular season and came into the 10-race Chase seeded second to leader and Sunday race winner Mark Martin, had a potential winning car early in the 300-lap race.

But about 23 laps after halfway, under the race's fifth caution, the left rear-axle cap on Stewart's No. 14 Chevrolet was noticeably wobbling. Stewart, who to that point had never dropped out of the top five, ran more than 20 more laps, but finally made an extended pit stop under the seventh caution, at Lap 195, that forced him to restart 26th.

From there, the scramble was on at a track where running back in traffic wreaks havoc with cars' handling. But after a final green-flag pit sequence that enabled him to lead one more lap and three cautions in the last 25 laps, Stewart finished 14th.

But the team co-owner appeared far from thrilled after he drove off the race track and parked his car behind its hauler in the garage. He slowly got out, removed his heat shields and placed them in the cockpit then, ignoring the soft drink and bottles of water left for him atop the car, turned to his assistants and said, "Let's go."

He purposefully strode from the garage, ignoring the small cadre of print and television media who were waiting behind his hauler to speak to him.

Later, Hutchens and crew chief Grubb agreed there were some positives their team could take from the day. Stewart entered the Chase 20 points behind Martin and now heads to Dover next week sixth in the points, 74 behind Martin.

His team knew how much worse it could have been if Stewart had finished back in the 20s.

"Oh yeah, we made a really good recovery," Hutchens said. "Darian and [car chief] Jeff Meendering and the guys got the car fixed and got back out without losing a lap and we salvaged a top-15 finish out of it."

"We came back and didn't go any laps down or anything like that, fixed the problem on pit road and came back halfway through the field, at least," Grubb said. "It's about all we can take out of here. We didn't hurt ourselves too bad in points, but it still hurts.

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It's either 30 seconds worth of labor where somebody left something loose or didn't do the right procedure. Or a two-dollar part [failed] that really hurt us.

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DARIAN GRUBB

"We're a new organization. We're going to have to fix all those problems and keep getting stronger. I haven't seen [Stewart] yet. I'm sure he's upset, just as much as I am. He should be. We let him down. We have to assemble that car to the utmost of our abilities and we missed it."

Neither drew any connection to the three mediocre races Stewart-Haas' lead car had executed heading into the Chase opener and Sunday's finish. Stewart, who started second, actually led the race's first lap and paced the field three other times for a total of 52 laps out front.

"The car was good here anyway," Grubb said. "Definitely when you fall back in traffic it starts hurting the car's performance, but even then Tony was able to pass some cars after we fell back there.

"The car was better to start with, and obviously the track got a little more slick and a lot of guys' adjustments seemed to work better than what ours did, but I still think we would have had a good top-five [Sunday]."

And while they won't be sure exactly what happened until the hauler and race car returns to the team's North Carolina shop, the two men knew a couple of things for sure.

"It's pretty rare," said Hutchens, a trained engineer who's long raced his own modified stock car and has a decades-long career in competition management for Richard Childress Racing, Dale Earnhardt Inc. and now, Stewart-Haas. "I don't know that I've ever had that happen before, but we'll go back and evaluate it and look at the parts and pieces and try to determine exactly what went on there.

"I've seen it happen to other peoples' cars before, but we've got to do a little evaluation of our own and see where we're at."

"We're not really sure what happened, it's kind of putting the chicken before the egg, right now," Grubb said. "But the axle came apart, basically, and the left-side cap was pushed off by the axle. So we've got to go back and take a look at a few things.

"I've never had it happen and that's why we're going to have to go back and look at it a little deeper and see if we can figure out what happened."

Grubb still felt the pain of missing out on a better finish.

"It's either 30 seconds worth of labor where somebody left something loose or didn't do the right procedure," Grubb said. "Or a two-dollar part [failed] that really hurt us. We absolutely had to fix it, because if we didn't, the axle was going to come out.

"We knew exactly what it was, but when we came in, the only question was what was the approach we were going to use to fix it. We came in and saw what happened and luckily the guys were ready."