It’s still early in the season but Noah Gragson is immediately proud of the resiliency shown by crew chief Drew Blickensderfer and the Stewart-Haas Racing No. 10.
Due to an inspection penalty issued after Las Vegas, Gragson and team entered the weekend at Las Vegas with negative points, but the driver responded with his best overall start at the highest level with a sixth-place finish.
Gragson is still in a significant hole, 34th in the standings and 43 points out of a provisional playoff spot, but these are the kinds of performances that will get them out of it pretty quickly if they are repeatable.
“It’s been alright,” Gragson said about the start of his season. “What satisfies me probably the most is how we’ve been able to deal with the challenges and adversity that come our way. Obviously, Atlanta was a tough weekend overall with wrecking on the first lap and then going into Vegas negative in points, so seeing how we rebounded was really big for me and stood out in my mind.
“I’m really proud of our team and being able to show an effort of coming back after a tough weekend and tough week leading into Vegas, so the rebound was big and then to be able to hopefully roll on with this momentum is good as well, coming off a sixth-place finish at Vegas.”
It was important for Gragson, as well as everyone associated with Stewart-Haas Racing to get off to a fast start, because team co-owner Tony Stewart has threatened major changes within the organization if they don’t make progress towards ending a three-year slump.
Maybe that doesn’t really apply to Gragson, or even teammate Josh Berry, both in their first years with the team but there is a sense or urgency at the shop in Kannapolis, North Carolina.
“I don’t really feel any pressure,” Gragson said. “I think it’s because I feel like I have a lot of trust in the organization as a whole and I feel like they have a lot of trust in me.
“I know it’s still early, but I’m just making relationships and developing those in the shop over the past two or three months has been good. To be able to have that support in the shop takes pressure off myself.
“They’ve told me, no matter the department, ‘we want you to haul ass and go to the front; we’ll rebuild the race cars if we need to,’ and that gives me confidence that I have their trust and support.”
He also feels comfortable behind the wheel of the NextGen car, something he didn’t expect this season even after having 40 starts in them over the past two seasons.
Be it the teams he was with or other external circumstances, Gragson felt like he was still getting comfortable with a racing platform that is radically different than anything else in Stock Car racing.
“It’s the most comfortable I’ve ever felt by a long shot inside the race car, and I told our crew that after the race, it’s like, ‘Man, I feel like I can feel every corner of this race car,’ where the tires were loading and I didn’t have that last year,” Gragson said.
“Those cars were evil to drive. This allows me to be a lot calmer and a lot more patient and allows me to give better feedback, too, because you’re only worrying about one or two things.
“We were pretty close the way we unloaded this past weekend. ‘Hey, I’m a little loose here. I’m a little tight here,’ and there’s two or three things that you’re trying to fix in practice, where last year I would get out of the car and I’m like, ‘Man, I don’t even know where to start because there’s like 10 different things going on,’ and we couldn’t fix them all.”
Gragson was pleased with their speed and overall performance at Las Vegas, the first real downforce race of the season but says this weekend at Phoenix is an equally big test, because it’s the first short track race of the season and the first with a new rules package for those types of tracks.
The second-year Cup driver says he feels a little bit of swagger entering Phoenix because of Vegas but also the slate starts anew with each new weekend.
“We can talk about (Vegas) all week, but once the tires hit the racetrack it’s a new opportunity, so we’ve been working hard this week to get in position to run good at Phoenix hopefully, but we just want to become better and learn throughout practice,” Gragson said. “It’s still very early in the season and I think our expectations are pretty realistic.
“We want to finish better than we start and we want to improve all day. If we can do that, no matter if it’s a sixth-place finish or if it’s we ran 18th all day and finished 14th that’s still good in my mind because we made improvement and we finished better than we ran all day.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.