There's appears to be a new Tony Stewart this season, however. His flare-ups are at least of the low-profile variety. He told the Associated Press's Mike Harris earlier this year that he "got tired of being angry." To deal with his volatile temperament, Stewart brought in a sports psychologist midway through the 2002 season. He's says he's learned to relax, maintain his cool, and not let the myriad of distractions in the sport get under his skin.
Considering the team's problems this season--situations that most often have been out of Stewart's control--the new mindset couldn't have come at a better time. Stewart sounds like a motivational speaker when analyzing his team's midseason problems--far different from the angry man he became during trying times last season.
"It's been just little things here and little things there," Stewart says. "It's not been anything huge. I think all you guys (the media) expected me to flip out this year with the way things have gone, but we're running good. We're doing everything right. We just haven't had the luck to go with it. Having last year over with and out of the way and the stress of that being gone, it's helped put things in perspective. If we were running 25th to 30th or something, and blowing motors and having something happen, it would be harder to deal with. "(Zipadelli is) putting great setups on the cars. The guys are building good cars, good bodies, good motors. All the ingredients have been there to win races all year, (but) it's a matter of having everything go our way. When you have a year like we had last year, we needed a lot of luck at the end of the year to help get us up to where we were. That's what happened--we had good luck. My grandfather's turning out to be a genius. He said everything makes a full circle, and it has. It went from everything being really good at the end of the year to things starting off to kind of going south for us.
Accidents at Richmond (upper right) and Bristol provided early setbacks to the HomeDepot team.
"Now, hopefully, it's coming back the other side of that circle and we're finishing that cycle. There's nothing you can do about it. I think I've probably dealt with it better than Zippy has this year. I'm the one inside the trailer at the end of the day trying to find the positives in every negative this year. It's kept us with an open frame of mind to say, 'Hey we're doing everything we need to do; it's just a matter of getting luck on our side.' With that in mind, it has let us stay focused for the next week and not dwell on the past week."
While the sports psychologist no doubt helped the man dubbed "Tony the Tiger" deal with the stress of a Winston Cup campaign, there's nothing quite like a Winston Cup championship to ease an angry mind and soothe the psychological wounds of failure.
"It just seemed like once we won the championship last year, it was like a weight was lifted off our shoulders--like I dumped a 3,000-pound weight off my back," says Stewart. "As a race team, this year we've had more fun. Between the guys on the crew and myself, we've really enjoyed our racing this year. That's something we'd started to lose in the past.