NASCAR’s Tony Stewart says ‘too early to panic’ over winless season

Tony Stewart has yet to win a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race this season, but the three-time champion said Friday that he’s not in panic mode about it.

“It’s just a matter of when is it going to happen,” Stewart told reporters at Delaware’s Dover International Speedway, site of the next Cup race Sunday. “Our track record shows that we can get [a win].”

Indeed, the 43-year-old Stewart entered the season having won at least one Cup race in each of his previous 15 years in the series.

That included winning at the one-mile Dover track a year ago, before Stewart suffered a broken right leg in a crash while racing sprint cars in Iowa in early August. The injury sidelined him for the rest of the year.

Stewart drives the No. 14 Chevrolet and co-owns his Cup team, Stewart-Haas Racing. He’s off to a decidedly mediocre start this year with four top-10 finishes through the first 12 Cup races. He’s 22nd in the championship point standings.

NASCAR implemented changes this year that put a premium on winning races, rather than accumulating points, in the first 26 races to qualify for its 10-race Chase for the Cup title playoff. The last race before the Chase starts is at Virginia’s Richmond International Raceway on Sept. 6.

“You get six or eight weeks before Richmond, then you start panicking if you don’t have that win,” Stewart told the reporters, according to a transcript from Team Chevy Racing. “It’s still too early to panic, at least for us.”