At Stewart-Haas, season of change brings optimism, opportunity
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Greg Zipadelli chuckles when he considers the enormity of the task Stewart-Haas Racing faced nearly a year ago.
Completing a transition from long-time manufacturer Chevrolet to Ford, scouring the ninth-season organization of its bow-tie branding - from every article of clothing to every link on the company web site - and having 14 speedway cars prepared for drivers Kevin Harvick, Kurt Busch, Clint Bowyer and Danica Patrick for the Feb. 26 Daytona 500. All of this roughly a year after revealing the team’s stunning intentions. The project was more daunting than the team’s competition director imagined.
So was keeping the secret in the NASCAR community, where the rumor mill always is churning. Both Ford executives and Zipadelli would change clothes in cars before meeting at various locations around the Charlotte area to avoid being spotted wearing giveaway logos. Eventually, they convened in the relative security of the Haas F1 Team headquarters adjacent to SHR in Kannapolis, N.C.
“There was six or eight months of living two lives,” Zipadelli told USA TODAY Sports. “It was six months where only five people knew. Nobody knew, it was four or five people from our company and two of those [team co-owners Gene Haas and Tony Stewart] were basically completely removed from it.
"I would give them updates of where we were at and what we thought was going on and, at the end of the day, they asked after I did an evaluation if I thought we could go and be competitive and not really have much of a downside, then we would go do it. But under no circumstances could we take a step backwards.”
SHR technical director Rex Stump didn’t know until the decision to move was basically made. Crew chiefs Rodney Childers (Harvick), Tony Gibson (Busch), Mike Bugarewicz (Bowyer) and Billy Scott (Patrick) weren’t informed until the late fall that everything they’d been planning for 2017 in Chevrolets would be scrubbed.
SHR remained contractually tethered to Chevrolet until December, but a team had begun to dissect Ford products in an attempt at a seamless transition. It didn’t happen. Acquiring motors was “a bigger deal than we thought,” Zipadelli said. They often didn’t fit into chassis SHR had built.
“The guys did a good job. They built 14 new speedway cars. They were all really close. They don’t seem to be running too terribly bad here so far,” Zipadelli said last week at Daytona International Speedway, where all four cars were within .325 seconds of the lead in a first practice and Bowyer had the fourth-best Daytona 500 qualifying time. “It’s just so much. … There’s going to be some bumps in the road, I’m sure, but we’ll figure it out.”
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Zipadelli anticipates multiple bumps in the immediate weeks after the Daytona 500, when the series races at 1.5-mile tracks in Atlanta and Las Vegas, a one-miler at Phoenix and a 2-miler in Fontana, Calif.
Some of those bumps could be alleviated with the foundation of another alliance with a power organization. SHR had one with Hendrick Motorsports, from whom it purchased chassis, motors and technical expertise. It has begun to make inroads on a similar relationship with Team Penske - the Ford powerhouse in the garage with Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano. It may not immediately provide the “utopia among the Ford teams” that Ford executives envision, Team Penske president Tim Cindric told USA TODAY Sports, but it could lead to an expanding of cooperation and collaboration. Zipadelli said the Penske organization seems “to be way more open to it than they used to be in the past with anybody.”
That’s mainly because SHR possesses traits Team Penske values: continuity and trustworthiness. Zipadelli and Stump have begun to discuss collaboration possibilities with Penske’s seventh-year NASCAR competition director Travis Geisler and 10th-year vice president of operations Mike Nelson.
“You want people who are committed to their organization for a long period of time or a known period of time to where you’re not worried about the guy going to work for another one of your competitors,” Cindric said. “You just want to know they have shelf life with their team for a while.
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"We continue to vet those things and in time you’ll continue to see those relationships growing, not only with Stewart-Haas, but hopefully within the Ford camp. We did some of those things early in with Roush (Fenway Racing) and as you saw there were changes, where they wanted to focus on some things that were more important than the collaboration, and understandably so.”
Penske left Dodge’s shuttering program – with Keselowski winning a championship in 2012 – for Ford, but Cindric said SHR is in a better position to immediately succeed. Whereas Penske entered a Ford camp that Cindric called “Roush-focused and the other teams were Roush customers,” the current dynamic is more one of independent collaboration.
“The overall approach and the type of relationship Stewart-Haas is walking into is a bit different than some of (the) things we had to transition through,” Cindric said. “Us being a competitor there changed the landscape.”
And so could Stewart-Haas, after being heavily recruited by Ford chief technical officer Raj Nair and global director Dave Pericak to help produce the company’s first driver champion since 2004. Fords now comprise 13 cars and a more united front against a Toyota fleet that won its first manufacturer’s title last season.
"It’s going to be exciting this year to include Stewart-Haas in the lineup of Fords on the track and to level the playing field a bit, have more bullets in the gun," Pericak said.
Follow James on Twitter @brantjames
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