NEWTON, Iowa — Whenever Ricky Stenhouse Jr. gets to compete at Iowa Speedway, his eyes light up. It’s a venue where he dominated in the Xfinity Series, winning three consecutive races between 2011 and 2012 en route to back-to-back championships.
The difference this time, though, was that portions of the .875-mile short track were repaved in the weeks leading up to its inaugural Cup Series date. The repave led to a significant increase of grip and had drivers skeptical before the race.
But the track widened out. And Stenhouse moved through the field from his 35th-place starting position.
“As the race went on, I started smiling at some of the things I was doing in the car that came back to me from 12 years ago,” Stenhouse stated. “There was definitely some things that I took away from racing here back in the day that helped me when my car was loose at the end. That was cool to feel some of those things that I felt a long time ago.”
Stenhouse gained crucial ground in the opening stage, placing 22nd. During the second stage, he continued going in the right direction up the leaderboard and moved up to 13th.
Throughout the final stage, Stenhouse was a mainstay in the top 10. On a pit stop following what turned out to be the final caution of the race on Lap 261 for Chris Buescher blowing a right-front tire, the No. 47 team’s crew chief Mike Kelley elected to go after track position. He joined Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano as the three drivers who took two tires.
In an 84-lap run to the checkered flag, Stenhouse’s car never drifted off. He rounded out the top five, scoring his second top-five finish of the 2024 season (Talladega). It marks his first top five on a non-superpspeedway since the Bristol dirt race last spring. It’s his first top-five finish on a non-superspeedway asphalt track since 2022 at Dover Motor Speedway.
“It feels great,” Stenhouse said. “My team works really hard and we look at a lot of things that we do week in and week out and we feel like we’re doing things correctly, we’re just not putting it together. This whole weekend, we put it together aside from qualifying.
“Great strategy, the war room did a great job. Our [car] was flawless that last run.”
The fifth-place finish snapped a six-race skid for Stenhouse of finishing outside the top 10. The No. 47 team hasn’t been able to follow up its breakthrough 2023 campaign with the same level of success. Of course, that season started off with a bang by winning the Daytona 500. He signed a multi-year extension to remain at JTG last month.
Stenhouse hopes that his fifth-place finish at Iowa can be the momentum boost that the No. 47 team needs.
“We’ve done a lot of good things throughout this year, we just haven’t put it all together,” he said. “We just have to keep putting everything together and not shoot ourselves in the foot.”
The Cup Series heads north to New Hampshire Motor Speedway next weekend, a venue where Stenhouse’s numbers might not jump off the board with a pair of top 10s in 16 starts. But in four starts since joining JTG Daugherty Racing, he has a trio of top-20 finishes.