RELATED: See where Stenhouse ranks in the standings
CONCORD, N.C. — If there’s a tipping point that illustrates how far Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has developed in his NASCAR career, it’s one that traces back to the spring of 2010.
Stenhouse had begun his rookie NASCAR Nationwide (now XFINITY) Series season by crashing out of five of the first 12 races. On the 12th, at Charlotte, he doubled down on his early magnetic tendencies for running into walls or other competitors, demolishing one car in pre-race practice and exiting the race in another crack-up after just eight laps.
By then, team owner Jack Roush had had enough.
“It just added up,” Stenhouse says now. “That’s the thing that Jack wanted to really focus on — it wasn’t that crash, it was the other ones before that. You’re going to get caught up in wrecks and you’re going to have issues that are out of your control, but he wanted to focus on the ones that were in my control.”
With the cumulative effects of bringing Stenhouse’s wrecked cars back from the track wearing him down, Roush benched his young driver, putting him to work in the shop, helping to fix the damage in a very literal sense.
“I cut up cars, a lot of chassis,” Stenhouse says, pointing from his spot in the lobby of Roush Fenway Racing‘s museum to one of the buildings on the team’s spacious campus where he got his hands dirty. “I did some bodywork. I made quarterpanels and stacked ’em up on shelves so that when the guys were ready to build a car, they had a quarterpanel ready to go.”
The benefits of such a hands-on character-building experience had the desired effect. Stenhouse went without a crash-related DNF the rest of the season. One year later, he was hoisting the first of two consecutive NASCAR Nationwide Series championship trophies.
Six years removed from those humble beginnings, Stenhouse is a fourth-year vet in NASCAR’s premier division, still driving for Roush and still aiming to help the organization back to prominence. He comes off the Sprint Cup tour’s idle weekend buoyed by a fifth-place finish at Auto Club Speedway and improved performance elsewhere in the season’s early going.
It’s been a journey of transformation from crash-prone rookie to established veteran, the latest step in a path forged by those early morning arrivals at the shop in 2010.
RELATED: Stenhouse helps team fix car at Martinsville
Personnel matters
Roush Fenway Racing‘s rebuilding process has been long in the making. The team hasn’t won since 2014, enduring its worst NASCAR season in its 28-year existence last year.
The downturn in performance led to plenty of personnel moves across the organization, but one team was largely, purposely kept intact — the No. 17 Ford with Stenhouse and crew chief Nick Sandler. The decision meant that for the first time in his Sprint Cup career, the Mississippi native wouldn’t be starting a season with a new crew chief.
“There was a conscious decision to keep that team together and I think that spoke a lot about how our team worked and the people that we had,” Sandler said. “We sort of felt that was an important thing, that everyone had enough faith in that group to keep us all together and that we really needed to perform this year.”
With their roles established, Stenhouse and Sandler set about improving their communication in the hopes that, in turn, their performance would gain traction. Helping matters was Sandler getting more familiar atop the pit box in managing race-day operations.
“There were a lot of times last year where I was worried about race strategy and how we were going to do things throughout the race and I would catch myself not staying as focused as I needed to in the car about driving the car and I’d make a mistake,” Stenhouse says “… There were just so many things that added up at the beginning of the year last year that came from trying to do too much from inside the car. I think it’s really helped me a lot and him to have more confidence in the calls that he makes, the changes that he makes on the race car as well.”
Last season marked Sandler’s first as a crew chief, but his history with Roush Fenway runs deep. He joined the organization as a shock specialist in 2006 and served as a team engineer under veteran wrench Jimmy Fennig, helping him transition to managing the team’s weekend and race-day calls.
“The comfort level is growing,” said Sandler. “I don’t know that you ever get completely comfortable in that role. It seems like it’s always a different challenge every week.”
RELATED: Roush seeks to make big gains in 2016
Moving forward
Stenhouse has registered just one top-five finish each season since joining the Cup Series full-time in 2013. Making the top-five in California the first of more to come will require the No. 17 team to continue a trend — turning last year’s struggle spots into strong suits.
“I think when you look at the progress between last year at those tracks versus now, I think it’s a big jump,” Stenhouse says, admitting that his team is playing the optimism cautiously. After all, it’s a five-race stretch in a season of 36, and a part of a larger rejuvenation effort within Roush Fenway’s corporate confines.
“This is the first offseason where the cars have gotten even better from where we ended,” Stenhouse said. “So I think everything that we’ve done hiring-wise and in management roles and different positions, I think is in the right direction and the pieces that they’re working on are the correct pieces. Still a lot of fine-tuning left to do and a lot of progress still to be made, but I do think that we’ve made some progress through last year through the offseason and it’s paying off.”
Roush Fenway’s three-driver lineup of Stenhouse, Greg Biffle and Trevor Bayne remained intact for 2016, but other personnel realignments — combined with a new technical alliance with fellow Ford affiliate Front Row Motorsports — have also begun to take root.
“We’ve done some changes in terms of (car) building on the technical side, making better cars, and then we’ve also culturally there’s been a little bit of a change here, too,” Sandler says. “That’s all been positive. I think that we’re — company-wide — we realize that we have a long uphill battle to get back where we’re contending the way we should and the way we have. We sort of stepped back and laid a really good foundation for that last year and it’s taking some time to start to seed.”
RELATED: Early returns have Roush Fenway trending up
Positive growth
While Roush Fenway Racing aims for its own rebirth, the 28-year-old Stenhouse has made his own strides in on-track maturity. That growth has spanned both of NASCAR’s top two national series, with each experience leaving its own impression.
The common bond has been communication.
“On the driving side, I think I grew in the Nationwide Series to a point, but then coming over to the Cup side, I kind of had to grow in different ways as far as the work ethic that I had to put back into talking to my engineers a lot more and talking to my crew chief a lot more,” Stenhouse said. “It kind of came a little bit easier in Nationwide once I figured out what I needed to do driving-wise. The cars were fast and I just showed up and drove and it was really good, but now we spend a lot of time during the week talking about things to be better for throughout the weekend.”
Since those earliest days, finding the fine line between being fast and out of control has been a delicate dance for Stenhouse, who too often rumpled sheet metal as he explored those limits early in his career.
It’s why trading in his fire suit to work in the shop was a difficult but necessary step in his development. Stenhouse sat atop the pit box during his 2010 benching to show his support, but he also bonded more deeply with his crew as he helped rebuild Roush’s cars in the shop.
“I think it speaks a little bit about Ricky,” Sandler said. “He’s got a lot of talent and a lot of desire. In those days, he had good performance and then some times he overachieved, and I think learning that balance is something that young drivers have to experience.”
Stenhouse said he’s occasionally had flashbacks to his shop experience when he’s endured rough stretches, the most recent one coming just last year. The reminders of those long work days that started bright and early at 6:30 a.m., have also helped remind him not only to keep his focus but of how far he’s come.
“If I look at it year-wise, it’s like, ‘Man, that was a long time ago,’ ” Stenhouse says. “It was one of those times that you’ll never forget and you’ll always have the stories. I think those are the stories that people like to hear.”
