BRISTOL, Tenn. – For the second time in three years, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. left a dirt-covered Bristol Motor Speedway with a top-five finish in the NASCAR Cup Series.
That comes as no surprise – the Mississippi native was slinging mud in sprint cars by age 15 and co-owns Stenhouse Jr. Marshall Racing, a World of Outlaws Sprint Car Series program he co-founded with Richard Marshall in 2017.
But the 2023 Daytona 500 champion hasn’t scored multiple top fives in a single season since 2020 when he landed three. After a fourth-place finish in Sunday’s Food City Dirt Race, Stenhouse now has two top fives on the year – an impressive rebound after a mechanical issue at Richmond left him 16 laps in the rears one week prior.
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“It says a lot about the hard work our guys have put in this offseason,” Stenhouse said. “I feel like at the end of every race, we’ve been pretty fast. You know, obviously, we had issues last week on that pit stop with our brakes. But we still had kind of a 12th-place average lap time throughout that whole race, even restarting at the back every time. So my guys are just doing a great job preparing the race cars.”
It’s been a quietly steady start to Stenhouse’s campaign, one that features a new-yet-familiar voice in his ear from crew chief Mike Kelley. In eight races, the No. 47 Chevrolet has finished inside the top 20 six times, including a seventh-place effort at Circuit of The Americas on March 26. Stenhouse had just one top 20 in the first eight races last year (10th at Auto Club Speedway).
“I think Mike’s done a fabulous job making sure that we’re prepared, and we have been way better coming to the race track,” Stenhouse said.
With preparation comes accountability across the board. The grind didn’t stop once the JTG Daugherty Racing team got to Bristol on Saturday.
“I was really proud of our team because after (Saturday’s) heat race,” Kelley told NASCAR.com, “we didn’t feel we were as good as we needed to be. And we worked till 11:00 last night on it. Worked on the sim. We wouldn’t let him (Stenhouse) go to sleep until we had good answers when we got back up this morning, and just kept digging on it to make sure we had a good car on the long run.”
The No. 47 team also has a stronger alliance with Hendrick Motorsports this season, a partnership that has proved fruitful for JTG Daugherty early.
“They’re working tight with the (Hendrick) guys and the Chevy guys,” Stenhouse said of his team at the shop. “We’ve not had that resource last year. So I think things like that are definitely helping our program. And when you put in the work, and you see the results, they just want to work harder and harder and put in more hours.”
Nearly a third of the way through the regular season, confidence is rising from the team’s Harrisburg, North Carolina, home base. Kelley is keen on growing that.
“I was wondering how tonight would go after (Richmond),” he said. “We had a really fast car, running top five and have an incident in the pits that took us out of contention. And I didn’t want it to stall the momentum that we’ve been building. And to come back here tonight and run well was what we needed to do.”
There’s reason to be optimistic. Martinsville Speedway is up next on Sunday (3 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), and while Stenhouse has never been exceptional there, he does have two top-10 finishes on the half-mile paperclip. Then comes a superspeedway at Talladega before returning to Dover Motor Speedway, where he ran second in 2022.
“We’ve still got things to clean up, but our short tracks are way better than what they were last year. I’m excited to get onto mile-and-a-half race tracks. We were a little bit off at Vegas (24th). I think we know why. We were better at Fontana than we were at Vegas, but we got some really good race tracks coming up as well.”
Kelley’s goal from the pit box, meanwhile, fixates on building upon the positives before the NASCAR playoffs begin in September – when Stenhouse will begin his postseason championship hunt.
“Just getting everybody to believe in what we’re trying to do and keep our heads down and work on our cars and not worry about the outside world,” Kelley said. “Focus on the group that we have and the cars that we have and each track one at a time.”
