Nearly two months after winning the biggest race of the year, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. says things have calmed down enough for the JTG Daugherty team to focus on racing.
“We definitely were super busy there for a while, but I feel like things are back to normal,” Stenhouse of everything that’s followed his Daytona 500 win. “It’s been really fun and really enjoyable. For us, we’re finally able to sit down and focus week to week on what we need to do at each racetrack, what we need to do going forward at racetracks ahead, and just learn as much as we can.
“I feel really good about a lot of the racetracks we’ve been to and our speed. Obviously, not every racetrack we’ve got the finish out of it that I feel like speed-wise we’ve had, so that’s a bummer at some points.”
Stenhouse’s third career win in the NASCAR Cup Series was the second for JTG Daugherty Racing, but winning the Daytona 500 was a first for all parties involved.
Since then, he’s been pleased with the speed in his No. 47 Chevrolet. The results have been up and down, though. A seventh-place finish two weeks ago at Circuit of The Americas was his first top-10 finish since the season-opening race.
Last weekend, Stenhouse got off to a fast start at Richmond Raceway using impressive speed in the outside lane before a mechanical issue forced him to the garage. He was running fifth at the competition caution before coming to pit road — where the day began going downhill. He finished 35th, his worst finish of the season and his first finish outside the top 25.
“We had a really good car at Richmond last week,” Stenhouse said. “Obviously we had an issue on our pit stop that knocked the brakes off of it, so that was a kind of a freak accident. But we got it fixed and went back out there and felt like we had a top-12 car.
“So stuff like that gives us a lot of confidence moving forward, especially since that was a short track, and we struggled at short tracks last year. I think things like that are definitely encouraging for us, so I feel like that’s what we’ve been able to focus on now that it’s slowed down a little bit.”