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Now sitting third in points, the owner/driver is 0-for-16 in Cup races at the track.

Stewart

DARLINGTON, S.C. — There’s only three active tracks on the NASCAR schedule where Tony Stewart has yet to win a Cup race, and he’d like to cross Darlington Raceway off the list this weekend.
The best of the best have conquered NASCAR’s oldest superspeedway. From David Pearson’s record 10 wins to Richard Petty’s three trips to Victory Lane, the trophy sports the names of NASCAR biggest stars.
But Stewart has yet to join their company. The two-time series champion goes into Saturday night’s Southern 500 a frustrating 0-for-16 on “The Track Too Tough To Tame.”
“I’d win on my roof and on fire here. I’d take it anyway I could get it,” Stewart said Friday.
The egg-shaped, 1.366-mile track has never been overwhelmingly good to Stewart, who scraped the wall shortly after Friday’s first practice session began.
Stewart was sixth in his 1999 rookie race here, but has finished inside the top-10 in just 50 percent of his starts. He was hospitalized overnight following a 2002 accident that led to his career-worst 36th-place finish.
Although he won the Nationwide Series race here last year, he finished 21st in the Cup race, an event won by then-teammate Kyle Busch.
“We won a Nationwide race here last year, and it was an awesome feeling to finally win at Darlington. But to win a Southern 500, that’s a big one,” Stewart said. “Darlington is such a tough track to get a handle on and to be good at all day. You don’t see a lot of guys who have a lot of success. You see only a handful of guys who religiously run well there.
“If you can have a good day and win there, it’s a track that’s like winning at Bristol. It’s the same type of feeling — knowing that you conquered something that’s very hard to obtain.”
Ordinarily, Stewart might be dismissed from the list of contenders at Darlington. Stewart has failed to win a race before the 11th event of the year in all but two of his first 10 seasons.
Darlington is No. 11 this year.
But Stewart can’t be counted out at anything this season, his first as owner of Stewart-Haas Racing. Although many people predicted Stewart would struggle with the dual role of owner and driver, he’s found remarkable success in a job so many before him had trouble balancing.
Haas CNC Racing, a noncompetitive team he rebranded after claiming a 50 percent ownership stake, has quickly developed into one of NASCAR’s most solid organizations.