Now that Martin won with new team, is Stewart next?

AVONDALE, Ariz. -- It would have been a good question prior to this Sprint Cup season -- and surely, somewhere it was posed by someone.

Who would be the first to win a race this season between Mark Martin and Tony Stewart?

Stewart-Haas Racing

2009 Finishes

Race	Newman	Stewart
Daytona	36	8
Fontana	28	8
Las Vegas	25	26
Atlanta	22	8
Bristol	7	17
Martinsville	6	3
Texas	15	4
Phoenix	16	2
Rank	17	4

Then again, weren't the odds for that always stacked in Martin's favor? He was driving for venerable Hendrick Motorsports in a No. 5 Chevrolet that virtually everyone agreed was ready to roar under the careful eyes of talented crew chief Alan Gustafson.

And Stewart? He was taking over his own team, rebuilding it from Ground Zero at Stewart-Haas Racing. It was bound to take time to fit all the pieces together, right?

Well, Martin did become the first of the two to win when he captured the Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix International Raceway on Saturday night. But guess who was right behind him, finishing second?

That's right. Stewart.

"We're just chiseling away," Stewart said afterward. "Man, it's like I can taste it. I know it's coming. We're getting there. ... I'm telling you, we're so close. We're going to get a win here soon."

It was Stewart's third consecutive strong finish -- he was third at Martinsville and fourth at Texas in the previous two races -- and pushed him to fourth in the point standings. He has finished in the top eight in six of the eight Cup races to date. In that sense, his season has been marked by a consistency that has eluded Martin and so many others -- and defied the logic of those who insisted it would take Stewart some time to get up and running in the competitive fast lane.

What about Newman?

As impressive as Stewart's run in Phoenix was, it may not have been the most impressive in the Stewart-Haas stable. With radio communications lost for virtually the entire 312-lap race between Newman and his crew chief, Tony Gibson, the driver somehow hung on to finish 16th. He even led ever so briefly following a caution with 11 laps to go, when he stayed on the track and everyone else pitted.

"We didn't have radio communications the whole night, so we made no adjustments on the car. Nothing went right," a clearly frustrated Newman said immediately after the race. "So under those circumstances, finishing 16th and leading a lap, I guess that was a pretty good day for us. I knew I was a sitting duck at the end, but I had nothing to lose."

Newman insisted that he lost the ability to effectively communicate with his team after only five laps. Gibson put the estimate on the communications blackout at more like 30 laps. But either way, they spent most of the night trying rather unsuccessfully to improvise.

"Ryan tried to talk to us at different parts of the track throughout the race, but that didn't work," Gibson said. "We tried hand signals -- things like if you're loose, touch the door and if you're tight, touch the roof. And we tried to do a code using the touch-to-talk button. It was a struggle.

"It's a challenge to work on a race car when the driver doesn't have the ability to key up his radio and tell you what you need to do to make it better. I know it was a frustrating night for everybody, but I'm proud of Ryan for not giving up on the track and I'm proud of the guys for doing all they could in the pits."

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Stewart obviously is much more in tune with his own No. 14 Chevy on race days than he is with whatever is going on with Newman and the No. 39 team. But the owner/driver has never wavered in his support of Newman, who was 32nd in points after the first four races but is 17th now (thanks largely to back-to-back strong short-track showings at Bristol and Martinsville, where he was seventh and sixth, respectively).

"I'm proud of him," Stewart said of Newman. "They're in the same deal we are. We're getting that first set of notes this first half of the season. ... Ryan is doing a great job and the whole organization is doing a good job. We're getting there. It's right at our fingertips. We're real close. We just need that little bit more so we'll get there."

Why it's working

It's pretty obvious now that Stewart made the right hire in tabbing Darian Grubb as his crew chief. So far, Grubb is making all the right moves during not only the races, but even the weeks when the cars are set up and then the race weekends when adjustments must be made throughout practices and qualifying.

"We're qualifying better than I ever have," Stewart said.

Again, perhaps no one should be surprised by that. Grubb spent eight seasons working at Hendrick Motorsports, and might be the only crew chief in NASCAR history to enter his "rookie" season in 2007 with two Cup wins, including one in a Daytona 500, already to his credit. He won those races with Jimmie Johnson while Chad Knaus was serving one of his suspensions for pushing the envelope too hard.

Grubb's only full season as a crew chief came in 2007 when he helped Casey Mears earn the only victory of Mears' career thus far in the Coca-Cola 600. They did it on fuel mileage, perhaps the ultimate sign that the young crew chief knows his stuff and when to gamble for a win.

Throw in the fact that Stewart-Haas gets its engines and other technical support from Hendrick Motorsports, and now we can all begin to wonder why we thought Stewart and Newman might struggle in the first place.

Then again, even Stewart admits to being surprised over his fast start to the season. It has helped lift what even he believed might be the great burden of ownership from his shoulders as he has surrounded himself with good people that allow him to concentrate mostly on driving the No. 14.

"It doesn't feel like such a heavy weight when it's going well like this," Stewart said. "I don't think any of us would have predicted we would be in the top five in points. To have the runs like we've had the last three weeks, it definitely makes that a lot smaller and lighter weight on your shoulders than it would be if the team was struggling.

"It's amazing to think that with a new team we can go out and have this kind of a start to the year."

That is the other point worth considering. Stewart was a notoriously slow starter during much of his 10-year run with Joe Gibbs Racing, which he left at the end of last season. He usually didn't heat up until the weather did.

That bodes well for him and could be bad news for the rest of the Sprint Cup boys as spring turns to summer, and both Stewart and Newman grow ever more comfortable in their new digs.

"Nobody expected this. You feel privileged to be this good this soon. This is the best spring I've ever had, I think, in the history of my career here [in the Cup Series]," Stewart said. "It's nice to finally run good in the first third of the season instead of having to wait until the middle third and the last third of the year."

With that in mind, can Stewart be far behind in following Martin to Victory Lane?

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.

Joe Menzer is the author of "The Great American Gamble: How the 1979 Daytona 500 Gave Birth to a NASCAR Nation." Click here to purchase.