HAMPTON, Ga. — With the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup in full swing, it’s easy for drivers outside the postseason to get overlooked.
And while the battle for the championship is down to four races, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is coming into his own during the latter stretch of his third full-time season.
In the past five weeks, the 28-year-old has scored two top 10s (an eighth-place finish at Dover and a ninth-place finish last weekend at Talladega). His five straight top-15 finishes are the first time he has accomplished that in his Sprint Cup career. To put that in perspective, Stenhouse had just five top-15 finishes in the first 27 races of the season.
Since the Richmond race in September, the 2013 Sunoco Rookie of the Year has jumped up five spots in the standings to 24th and is only two points behind Danica Patrick for 23rd.
“My team is doing a great job. Nick (Sandler, crew chief) and my engineers and my car chief are all working together making sure that we are being as consistent as we can be,” Stenhouse said during a media availability at a NASCAR open team test at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Thursday.
“That’s doing everything in the shop, making sure that everything gets done the way it needs to. We’re going to the track each week with a set gameplan and trying to stick to that gameplan every week. Our cars are getting better as well, so it’s a combination of just a lot of hard work throughout this year.
“We really wanted to start the year running off inside the top 15 and work on it from there and get it even better, but we started the year off and it just wasn’t there. It’s been a good last month and a half or so for us and looking forward to finishing the year strong.”
The Roush Fenway Racing driver touched on the program’s struggles over 2015 but thinks there are plenty of reasons for optimism moving forward.
“I think we’ve definitely been behind for a couple of years now and we’re trying to put a lot of people in place. I think we’ve got some good hires that are going to come in this off-season that I’m real excited about to hopefully make our program better and build better race cars. Hopefully, this ending to the year that we’re having, hopefully we can start next year really similar.”
And with a new rules package in place for 2016, Stenhouse thinks that the low downforce package will help his team build off its late surge.
“I think everything we’ve been doing lately will really kind of go hand in hand with the issues that we are going to have next year with balance and the way the car handles. So I’m encouraged with the things that we have done that will also help for next year.”