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Stewart will have to adjust next year
He will have new crew chief in Grubb, after 10 years with Zipadelli
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Published: September 10, 2008
When Tony Stewart introduced Darian Grubb as his crew chief for 2009, Stewart's debut season as an owner-driver for one of Rick Hendrick's satellite Chevy operations, both said they were confident they can make this thing work, this new team, even with all the issues they'll face.
After 10 years with Greg Zipadelli as his crew chief, psychoanalyst and father confessor, Stewart is now embarking on a new phase of his racing career, and it's not at all clear how successful he'll be. He was given a $40 million stake in the Hendrick satellite team owned by Gene Haas and Joe Custer. That team hasn't done much over the years, despite Hendrick engines and Hendrick engineering, and that fabulous rolling-road wind tunnel.
But now this will be a much more high-profile operation, and how well Stewart and new teammate Ryan Newman come out of the box will be closely watched.
Stewart will have to learn the ins and outs of being a car owner -- and he can ask Ray Evernham, Robby Gordon and Eddie Wood about how much fun that can be. Stewart will also have to learn to communicate with a new crew chief which, after so many years with the incredibly patient Zipadelli, may be another not-so-easy task.
"It's about relationships," Stewart said. "You build chemistry -- that's something Zippy and I had to do from scratch, starting in '99.
"So when we had dinner last week, I mentioned that to Darian about the simple things, like ‘loose' or ‘tight,' things that can take Darian and me weeks to figure out. And if I'm having a bad day, how do you shorten the curve there and keep me focused?
"It's a very logical topic, that we talked about at length.
"But when we were figuring out who was going to be my crew chief, I asked Greg, ‘What do you think?' And Greg was very high on Darian.
"That was important to me. If the guy I've been with for 10 years thinks this is a good guy, that was huge peace of mind."
Stewart put Zipadelli through the emotional wringer over the years. Is Grubb, 32, really ready to try to deal with Stewart?
Stewart said his rough days are behind him: "We are through most of those parts. We are on the down side of that hill.
"And Zippy is spending time with Darian saying, ‘This is how we've worked together the last 10 years,' and there's a lot of notes to go off of."
Grubb, this season the engineering manager for the Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Casey Mears teams for Rick Hendrick, after spending 2007 working for Jimmie Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus, said he's going to spend as much time as he can with Zipadelli, learning more about Stewart.
"Any time you have someone that's got a 10‑year year relationship, you're foolish if you don't talk, just to see how things go," Grubb said.
"A 10‑year relationship -- it's going to be hard to build that history up, and you really can't create that right off the bat.
"But Zippy is a good guy, good friend of mine, and I'm not going to have a hard time giving him a call if I have an issue to talk to him about."
Grubb, an engineer Virginia Tech, is from Floyd, Va., about an hour north of Winston-Salem. He was the team engineer for Johnson and Knaus when he first came to the fore two years ago when NASCAR suspended Knaus for those Daytona tricks and Hendrick put Grubb at the helm, which made him officially the winning crew chief for the 2006 Daytona 500.
"When I did that deal with Jimmie, it was one of those things I didn't ever look for in the next step of my career," Grubb said. "But it's just something you can't pass up."
Whether Grubb has the tenacity and forcefulness to deal with Stewart remains to be seen. But Grubb is a good bridge between the official Hendrick operation and the new Stewart-Newman team.
"Never been tempted to leave, but yes, I have had offers," Grubb said. "This is just a great chance for me to step out on my own and build up the organization."
"We haven't worked together, so I don't know exactly how it's going to work," Stewart said. "But you look at what Darian has accomplished, those are the results we look at.
"It's not necessarily how you get to the end of the road to get to your goal, it's just that he can get to the goal. We have that confidence in him.
"With this new car, it's a more engineering background you have to have.
"It's hard to know how it's going to work right now between us, and how his style is going to be different than Greg's. But we've got the major ingredient here -- that we both have the passion to be successful."
A team is more than a driver and car owner and crew chief -- it takes a pretty stout front office staff to organize things. And looking at Michael Waltrip's problems in making the leap from driver to owner-driver, even with good sponsors and some good men at the top, it's been a struggle. And it's still a struggle for Waltrip.
Hence, the possibility of Jay Frye coming over as new general manager is a positive. While Frye said he's comfortable where he is, at Team Red Bull, he does acknowledge long-standing ties with Hendrick. But Frye won't say which way he's leaning.
And Stewart: "When we have something to announce, we'll tell you."
So for the moment it's Stewart in charge of things. "I keep telling Joe I'm going to teach him how to spend money," Stewart said.
"Darian and I are deciding what people he wants right now. We discussed things in Fontana.
"You can get too many people too early. So Darian and I work really closely together right now to get a game plan on what people we actually want and what positions, and evaluate where we're at over at the shop.
"He's got pretty good wit and humor, like we do. It didn't take long to figure that out. The more time we spend together, the more we laugh -- and last week we had a 2½-hour dinner and probably half the dinner was as much just talking personal stuff as it was professional.
"It's knowing each other inside and out.
"And just seeing the look on his face when he was at the shop told me this was going to be the right thing for us."
■ Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.
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