Everything old is new again at Stewart-Haas Racing

KANNAPOLIS, N.C. -- An old chrome bumper is built into the cashier's stand in the gift shop, while hood ornaments from cars of the 1940s and '50s line one wall. The public areas of Tony Stewart's new race shop have a distinctly retro feel, from the organization's art deco insignia to walls painted to resemble an old garage, complete with faux yellow siding and double barn doors.

Like a glove

If anyone had questions about Tony Stewart as an owner, all they had to do was check him out at Preseason Thunder.

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It's all quite appropriate, given the very real collision between old and new going on behind the plate-glass picture windows and onto the shop floor beyond, where Chevrolets of Stewart-Haas Racing are being prepared for the Daytona 500. This is still the same facility that housed a Haas-CNC team that managed only one top-five finish in six full seasons on NASCAR's premier circuit before Stewart took control late last year. Many of the same people who built those cars, which lurched to low finishes with drivers like Jeff Green and Scott Riggs behind the wheel, are building the vehicles that Stewart and Ryan Newman will pilot beginning next month.

So much is the same. Yet so much is different. The Stewart-Haas team, visited Wednesday by the NASCAR Sprint media tour, is the same organization that struggled to keep cars in the top 35 in owner points -- and yet it's not.

"I guess you could say it went from Windows 95 to Microsoft Vista," said Newman, using an analogy more than worthy of his engineering degree. "It's a whole new system. You've got the same shop, but the guts have changed. You have a new motherboard, you have a new processor, you have new RAM, you've got all these new things that should make it faster and better and a little bit better-performing computer."

This transition may be more like switching from a Commodore 64 to an iMac. Yes, Stewart-Haas kept the same two-year-old shop, retained dozens of the same people and is still using much of the same equipment that the old Haas-CNC Racing team used to finish 30th and 43rd in owner points last season. But Stewart, with the considerable help of competition director Bobby Hutchens -- arguably the most important hire the rebranded organization has made -- has overseen an overhaul less physical than it is mechanical and mental, and cultivated an air of confidence befitting a team with championship banners already on the walls. (Continued)