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.

"I really think we're going to hit the ground running," said Darian Grubb, who left juggernaut Hendrick Motorsports to become Stewart's crew chief. "I think we're going to go down [to Daytona], and we're going to be very competitive. We're ready to go to Daytona now. We're itching for the time we get to go be on the race track and let all this preparation pay off for us."

Of course, you hear this kind of stuff all the time on the media tour. Everybody is excited, everybody is hopeful, everybody is optimistic. Stewart-Haas has a former champion, a former Daytona 500 winner, and several big-name sponsors on board. So did Michael Waltrip Racing when it went big-time in 2007, and two years later that organization is still searching for its first victory.

“

I really think we're going to hit the ground running. We're ready to go to Daytona now. We're itching for the time we get to go be on the race track and let all this preparation pay off for us.

”

-- DARIAN GRUBB

The principals at Stewart-Haas, though, believe things will be different, a confidence that goes beyond the 46 race victories shared by their two drivers. Think of it not as an old team with a new name, but a completely new franchise, renovated from the inside out.

"We've kept 80 percent of the people who worked here, and we kept them for a reason, because we felt they could do the job," Hutchens said. "If we didn't, they wouldn't be here. But I think the mindset unfortunately in here, they've been beat down so bad just trying to get to the race track, just trying to make the race every week, the pressure of doing that ... is a lot more than, 'Damn, we qualified fifth instead of third.' Trying to change the culture in those 80 people we kept and getting them to buy into, 'Hey, we're going to the race track to win, we're not going to the race track just to make the race.' And I think they've had a lot of fun with it so far. They've accepted the challenge, the majority of them, and they understand what the big picture is and where we're trying to get."

The Stewart-Haas shop employs about 150 people, 50 of whom were hired after the ownership change. "Probably the hardest thing has been just learning names of guys," said Stewart, who ended his decade-long run with Joe Gibbs Racing after last season. "They've all got their keycards with their names on it, but the hard part is, everybody's got it down at their waist, and you don't want to look down there and give away that you don't know their name. It's, 'Hey buddy, how you doing?'"

If that's been Stewart's biggest hurdle this offseason, who knows what the organization might accomplish. The old Haas-CNC team, Hutchens points out, competed with a fraction of the sponsorship dollars that Stewart-Haas has been able to bring in. It put out car bodies that could vary from one to the next, something Hutchens worked to fix immediately after walking in the door. Every existing car was changed so they'd all conform to one another, and crew chiefs and engineers could trade notes that translated from one person to the next. No one expects results like the average finish of 25.8 -- best among Haas-CNC's menagerie of drivers -- that Riggs turned in last year.

"You've got to remember, they were a two-car team that really didn't have anything on that wall but Haas-CNC," Hutchens said, pointing to a variety of sponsor logos. "I think that limited them to a certain degree. It also limited them in being able to hire better people. Fortunately, we've been able to do both here since we've come in the door. At the end of the day, I use the term, 'It's all good.' I think it's going to be before it's said and done."

How good? Maybe race wins and Chase berths, prospects Stewart and Newman are accustomed to, yet would have been unthinkable in this exact building only a year ago. It's old and new, all at the same time.

"We wouldn't have taken this opportunity if we didn't think it was realistic to be in the Chase and have an opportunity of winning races and winning the championship," said Stewart, winner of two championships himself. "Now whether that happens or not, obviously that will wait to be seen. We feel like we have the tools in place to do that, and ... I don't think all these guys would have come together if we didn't feel like we had the opportunity and resources to do that."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.