Dr. Diandra: Stewart-Haas Racing by the numbers
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Stewart-Haas Racing was born in 2009, when Tony Stewart became a co-owner of what had been Haas CNC Racing. That move transformed a team that was hardly setting the NASCAR world on fire into a championship contender.
In its 16 years of existence, the team:
- Ran 1,980 Cup Series races and 336 Xfinity races.
- Won two Cup Series championships: Stewart in 2011 and Kevin Harvick in 2014.
- Won the 2023 Xfinity Championship with Cole Custer.
- Earned 70 Cup Series wins, the seventh most wins among teams during the period 1972-present.
- Earned 343 top-five finishes for a top-five finish rate of 17.3%.
- Earned 707 top-10 finishes (35.7%.)
- Had 13 different drivers in four cars — plus seven short-term relief drivers due to Stewart's various injuries.
Yet, when the checkered flag flew at Phoenix in 2024, Stewart-Haas Racing ceased to exist.
The drivers
The figure below shows the drivers who occupied SHR cars over the team's history. Red stars show championship years.
The Wins
Although SHR's final Cup championship was in 2014, a graph of wins by year shows that SHR posted 22 of its 70 wins (31.4%) in 2018 and 2020. (The 2019 season was pretty dismal for Fords in general.)
It's useful to interpret the number of wins per year in light of the personnel and number of cars involved. Although SHR won an average of 4.4 races per season, a deeper dive into the data presents another example of why averages never tell the whole story.
The checkered flag distribution is far from even among the eight winning drivers. The No. 4 car accounts for 37 of the team's 70 wins. Harvick and crew chief Rodney Childers won 52.8% of SHR's total Cup Series trophies. That includes one eight-race-winning season (2018) and one nine-race-winning season (2020) across 360 races.
Stewart earned 16 wins, including five in his championship year. That's another 22.8% of the SHR total. Together, Harvick and Stewart accounted for 53 wins or 75.7% of the total. Kurt Busch contributed another six, which means that 84.3% of all wins came from just 23.0% of the drivers.
Fourteen of Stewart's 16 wins came in the first four years of his tenure as a driver. He never won more than one race a season after 2012, due in part to a 2013 leg injury that required multiple surgeries, and a 2016 back injury. Likewise, Harvick earned only two wins in his last four seasons.
The Expansion
SHR started with two cars, adding a third in 2013 and a fourth in 2014. As a way of quantifying productivity, let's examine average wins per year per car.
- Over the four-year stretch from 2009–2012, the team won 17 races for an average of 2.1 wins per car per year.
- Compare that with the four-year period from 2014-2017, the first four years of SHR being a four-car team. SHR won 20 races, for an average of 1.25 wins per car per year.
Essentially, the team had twice the cars and slightly over half the return.
Of the five drivers who never won under the SHR banner:
- Danica Patrick was not only winless over five seasons and 180 races, her best finish was a sixth place at Atlanta in 2014. Her average finish was 23.8.
- Ryan Preece had a top finish of fourth over two seasons and an overall finishing average of 20.8 across 72 races.
- Daniel Suárez, Josh Berry and Noah Gragson did not post any wins, but each was only with the team for one year.
Out of 51 seasons where a driver competed in all 36 races, there were only five times a SHR driver ended the season with an average finish better than 10.0 (9.8%) — and all five instances were Harvick. Drivers had an average finish of 15.0 or better 24 times (47.0%.)
A Changing NASCAR
It's worth noting how much NASCAR changed since the team started. Charters, stages and the current 'playoff' format didn't exist in 2009. The table below shows how some key factors have changed.
2009 | 2024 | |
| Teams | 30 | 20 |
| Full-time cars | 35 | 36 |
| Full- or part-time one-car teams | 16 | 7 |
| Percent of full- or part-time one-car teams | 55.3% | 19.4% |
| Teams with four (or more*) full-time cars | 4 | 3 |
| Teams with two full-time cars | 3 | 8 |
| Teams with one full-time car | 5 | 2 |
| * NASCAR did not limit the number of cars a single team could have prior to the 2006 season. | ||
The number of full-time cars has remained roughly the same, but the number of owners is down by a third. There were more part-time cars on the track in 2009 — especially since 43 cars represented a full field until 2016, when NASCAR introduced charters.
Three teams ran two full-time cars in 2009. Today, that number is eight. The number of single-car teams dropped from five to two. While many teams are moving toward the three-to-four car level, they're doing it slowly.
Ramping up to four teams so quickly is, in my opinion, one of the primary elements that ultimately led to their demise. That Gene Haas insisted on adding a fourth car — and sponsoring it himself — over Stewart's concerns couldn't have helped. Other elements, like Stewart's ongoing and frequently vocal frustrations with NASCAR as well as his involvement in NHRA, certainly contributed as well.
The introduction of the Gen-7 car spawned new teams and the expansion of some smaller teams. Trackhouse Racing and 23XI got great starts in their first years. Both will expand to three cars in 2025. They would be wise to ponder the Stewart-Haas Racing case study.
