Stewart glad team deal secured early

Many NASCAR teams have reduced their staffing levels this year and others have merged in order to stay in operation, as sponsorship becomes ever more scarce amid the downturn.

Stewart has left Joe Gibbs Racing this year and become a part-owner of Haas CNC Racing, now operating under the Stewart Haas banner. He was able to secure sponsorship for himself and teammate Ryan Newman, to his relief.

"This was an opportunity that picked us. We didn't go out and pick it," said Stewart.

"But I think it shows that timing is everything. We were able to secure our sponsorships with Office Depot and Old Spice and then getting Ryan signed and having the US Army come on board his car makes me really proud as an owner that we were able to get all that done before the bottom fell out of the economy right now."

When asked if he could imagine starting a new team in the present economic situation, Stewart replied: "From scratch, no, definitely not. You would have to own a company that's doing well to probably do that right now.

"I think we were in a very fortunate position to be offered an opportunity with Haas CNC Racing to join their operation and help hopefully build it. If it were not for an opportunity like this, I don't think that we would have had this opportunity altogether, let alone with the economy the way it is now."

Stewart said that his squad had actually benefited from other teams releasing staff.

"I never thought that we would see the fall-out of employees that we have being released from teams," he said.

"But I guess that's probably been the one thing that's been positive for us is when it came to look at hiring more people and better people, it kind of gave us a buffet atmosphere because there were so many of them available.

"That was the positive to the negative from our situation, being able to have that many people that were looking for jobs that we could sort through and pick the people that we thought were right for the programme."

He added that he was confident it was still possible to bring sponsorship into NASCAR, even if the deals had to be smaller than in the past.

"All these companies are not just going to stop advertising all of a sudden because the economy is bad," said Stewart.

"There's a lot of them that are looking at it as a unique opportunity to take advantage of getting ahead of their competition. There's still money out there for the teams. It's just the amount of it has changed.

"I think the direction of seeing single sponsorships for a car for the season, I think there is going to be less and less of those, and it's more tailoring partnerships with companies to work with each other to make these sponsorships work."