Haas: Stewart will transform team

"Top to bottom, it obviously affects our people," Custer said. "How they view coming to the track this week is different. Loading on the plane today there was a different, exciting feeling at Haas.

"And the owners, Haas Automation and all the folks back in California building machine tools there, it affects them. So I think going forward, I'm not sure I realise how much that will change our organisation but I'm ready for it."

Custer said Haas have a close technical relationship with Hendrick Motorsports but had become frustrated at not being able to match the level of performance of their chassis and engine suppliers.

"First of all we have a great relationship with Hendrick Motorsports," Custer said. "But there are boundaries and there's a lot to it. It brings in Haas Automations machine tool piece where they're marketing machine tools through the use of the manufacturing of the motors at Hendrick. So there's a lot of business stuff that goes on.

"But there's no ownership between the two companies. Rick Hendrick doesn't make our decisions. We don't have any influence over his financial decisions. We're separate operating organisations.

"Although that being said, we are a customer and a technology partner on the chassis side of it. We purchase chassis from him. We get support for that. And it has been a frustration that our performance isn't at the same level of Hendrick Motorsports over the years."

Custer believes the key to their future success will be the quality of personnel they are able to attract now that Stewart is part of the organisation.

"If you go down the check list of motors, chassis, facilities, wind tunnel time, seven post rigs, all of the things that people use in our sport as excuses sometimes for the non-performance - we get to check most of those boxes," Custer added.

"But the people thing is a constant challenge in our sport. And again, we feel that we've got good people. But drivers are absolutely critical. And with this new chassis that we're working with, the CoT piece, it's even more. The driver is a huge factor. And that's really what drove this decision: performance.

"We want to win. And we feel Tony Stewart wants to win as bad as we do. And we think we can learn a lot from him and we're going to listen to him."