(Photo: Mitchell Richtmyre | The Podium Finish)
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — The last time Ricky Stenhouse Jr. walked into the Daytona International Speedway media center, he had just won the 65th running of the Daytona 500.
Six months later, he’s preparing to embark on his second journey through the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.
“It’s going to be real in a week, right? Or I should say after [Saturday], it’s real,” Stenhouse said in a press conference on Friday. “I feel like we’ve grown a lot as a team. We’ve gotten better in certain areas of our race team throughout the year and really things have stuck out where we need to be better, and I feel like we’ve corrected some of that. I still feel like we have some issues that we’re still working on and trying to clean up. Some of that is me as a racecar driver – getting to pit road, things on pit road, some race strategy calls that we’ve probably been a little bit off on. And then car speed.. we’ve struggled on that at some racetracks.
“I like the information that we have and the things that we’ve learned lately, and I feel like that’ll put us in a good spot going forward. But I like where we are. It’s real now. We’ve made the playoffs. We have one more kind of relaxed, kind of freebee race, and then it’s game time.”
Daytona 500 win or not, Stenhouse has pieced together one of the best years of his career. He’s 15th in overall points behind seven top 10s and has an average finish of 16th in his 25 starts.
The second half of the season, however, has been more of a mixed bag. He has just two top 10s since his seventh-place finish at Charlotte Motor Speedway in May and has dropped two spots in points since that.
Some of that, Stenhouse said, falls on qualifying. He’s made the final group of qualifying in just one of the last 11 races and has started 22nd or worse in four of the last five.
“The reality is that next week is everything matters. Like when we have a bad Saturday, it matters,” Stenhouse said. “We’ve had some bad Saturdays, as far as qualifying goes, and it set us back. It hasn’t been super detrimental. I think a bad Saturday in the playoffs is difficult to overcome.
“We know there’s no mulligans once we start next week. We’re done with the driving range, done goofing off. We’ll step up on the first tee next week and make sure that we’re ready to go.”
Stenhouse practices at Watkins Glen International. (Photo: Wayne Riegle | The Podium Finish)
At just five playoff points from February’s win, Stenhouse views Saturday’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 as an opportunity to pad that. All three of his Cup wins have come at superspeedways, including the 2017 summer Daytona race.
It’ll be just the second time in his career coming to the regular-season finale where he’s not in a must-win scenario to make the playoffs. That’s allowed the No. 47 JTG Daugherty Racing team to shift its efforts toward next week at Darlington Raceway, where Stenhouse qualified third in the spring.
“I feel like there’s a lot of guys that know that they have to make it to the end of the race to have an opportunity to make the playoffs,” Stenhouse said. “I’m hoping that gives us a way to kind of get some track position – stay upfront, battle for those stage wins. Seven points would go a long way for us in the Round of 16 and so on.
“My guys have been kind of looking at Darlington this week and trying to prepare for that. We were good at Darlington earlier in the year. We had kind of a misfortune with a flat left-rear tire that we lost time under green pitting. I feel really good about where we are as a team. I don’t think we have to win in the first round to make it through by any means, so we’ll go do our jobs each and every week – try to be perfect and let others make mistakes to move on through that round.”
But regardless of what happens in the playoffs, 2023 is a win for the team and organization. They’re guaranteed a top-16 finish in both driver’s points and owner’s points. They won their first race in nine seasons.
Even if it’s an early exit, they’ll still have plenty to race for.
“Say we were eliminated in the first round, we could still finish fifth in points, right? So there’s a ton left to race for, no matter what happens in the first round,” Stenhouse said. “In 2017, we finished 11th in points. We had a really good shot at finishing ninth in points after getting eliminated … For us, there’s a lot to race for no matter what happens in that first round.”
Saturday’s race is set for 7 p.m. ET on NBC, Peacock, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
