Auto Racing: Veteran goes from winning the Daytona 500 to becoming the star of silly season
New ride awaits Newman
Leaving Penske after seven years
Ryan Newman sat down with some reporters for an interview session at a Rochester restaurant last week, and before the first word of the first question was out, he put down the verbal equivalent of a great block of a car trying to pass him.
“I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Newman said quickly.
Newman knew the question was going to be about his plans for next season, because that’s all he’s been hearing for nearly a month — since he told team owner Roger Penske this would be his final year in the blue No. 12 he’s driven all seven seasons of his Sprint Cup career.
The widely held assumption is that he is already set to drive the second car for the new Stewart-Haas team owned by Tony Stewart.
“I’ve made a decision, but I’m not going to release what I’m doing or where I’m going,” Newman said. Some reports have had Newman reaching an agreement to drive for Stewart, but both sides have said nothing was finalized.
Even before the mid-July announcement that Newman was leaving Penske, the 30-year-old native of South Bend, Ind., had been the star of what is known as NASCAR’s “silly season,” the time of year when teams and drivers plan for the following season while fans and the media try to figure it all out.
Newman started the season in the headlines for a very different reason.
He won a stirring Daytona 500 with teammate Kurt Busch helping push him to Penske’s first victory in the Great American Race.
But since then, Newman’s place in the points has steadily declined.
As NASCAR makes its annual visit to the historic road course at Watkins Glen International, Newman is 15th in Sprint Cup points and is not considered a serious threat to qualify for the postseason. Newman is 173 points out of 12th with five races to go before the top 12 enter the 10-race postseason.
“We started off with obviously a great feat,” said Newman. “We basically just steadily fell down in the points, and went from first to second to fourth and so on. . . . It’s been tough — we’ve had three engine failures — two of them during a race, one during practice, and that’s not what you what.”
Failings like that led him to leave Penske.
“I had said what I was lacking most was just pure performance, and that’s the physical parts of the thing — the parts and pieces of the race car, the engine, those type of things,” said Newman, who knows more than most drivers about those parts thanks to his degree in vehicle structure engineering from Purdue University. “I hadn’t seen improvement in 20 races, which is plenty of time.”
You hear a little envy in Newman’s voice when he talks of how Richard Childress’ equipment has helped Kevin Harvick set a modern-era record of 65 races without a DNF (did not finish), how Carl Edwards’ Roush team has nailed the setup for the 1z-mile tracks and how Kyle Busch’s outstanding season for Joe Gibbs is due to not just a great driver but a great organization.
“To be quite honest, the Penske organization isn’t what it once was,” said two-time Sprint Cup champion and current ESPN analyst Dale Jarrett. “I’m sure it will get back to that point, but for Ryan it’s time to move on. . . . Ryan knows race cars well and he’s a good barometer of where your race car is. If your car doesn’t got fast with him driving it, you need to look in other areas to make the car go fast.”
Asked his career goals, Newman said:
“It’s just to be successful and make fans happy, whether they’re NASCAR fans or Ryan Newman fans, and have fun doing it. It got to a point there for a while where it wasn’t fun anymore. It became work. And that’s the last thing I want to call it.”
