Stewart forced into 'go-for-broke' mode at Kansas

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Tony Stewart can find one positive to his current position in the Chase standings.

"We have nothing to lose and everything to gain, really," the two-time champion said. "It is a situation that I wish we could say that we were right in the middle of this and had to worry about everything. In two weeks I have dug myself a pretty big hole. It's literally a go-for-broke attitude. We don't have anything to lose right now. Tenth doesn't mean anything to me in the point standings. I'm going for everything I can get right now."

Stewart comes to Kansas Speedway 10th in points, 162 behind leader Denny Hamlin after a pair of trying weekends to open NASCAR's championship playoff. At the opener in New Hampshire, an attempt to win the race with an extended fuel run ended with a dry tank within sight of the white flag, and a 24th-place finish. Last week at Dover, Stewart lost a lap on a pit-road speeding penalty, lost another on the ensuing long green-flag run, and finished 21st.

"I just have made mistakes the last two weeks that have cost us," Stewart said. "... I can't do anything about it now. All I can do is go out there and do the best I can the rest of the year."

At Kansas, that may mean taking chances. Crew chief Darian Grubb said the No. 14 car needs race wins to pull it out if its points deficit, and don't be surprised if Stewart attempts another New Hampshire-type gamble to try and get one.

"I think it would make it easier to make the decision to gamble, if it comes down to it at the end of a race, just because we basically need wins to get ourselves back into the game," Grubb said. "But we're here to win races anyway. We had a situation at Loudon where we had to go for the win. The exact same strategy won the race. It wasn't like it was the wrong call, we just didn't execute it correctly. That's what put us in this situation. Dover, we took ourselves out of it with the speeding penalty. We didn't have the greatest car there, but we could have salvaged a top-five, top-10 day. We didn't execute there, either. We just need to execute better with the plans we have each week."

Although Stewart qualified 14th at Kansas and turned the 18th-fastest lap in final practice for Sunday's event, Grubb was pleased with the car. It's the same vehicle Stewart used to win earlier this season at Atlanta, and the crew chief believed he'd be able to tune it to accommodate the cooler, less windy weather conditions expected in the 400-mile race. These days Grubb may be more apt to take gambles on the track, but not under the hood.

"We're going further in the direction of lessons we've learned over the past six months," he said. "We're going further and further along those same lines trying to get better. We're not just resting on our laurels. Then again, we're not going out there with a setup to try something [risky], either."

The results of the last two weeks, and Stewart's position in the Chase standings, likely mask a program more capable than it seems -- it's easy to forget now that the No. 14 car led 100 laps at New Hampshire, for instance, and won the last race on an intermediate 1.5-mile tri-oval similar to the Kansas track. Of course, that knowledge doesn't help Stewart in his current situation.

"The last two weeks are what they are," he said. "We can't change, we can't fix it. We can't go back and redo it. It is a tough situation to be in where we have got behind in two weeks. We have eight weeks to do the best we can to get everything we can get out of them."