Stenhouse looking for a win at Iowa Speedway

NEWTON, Iowa — Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is feeling a little frustrated these days, which might seem odd given the year he’s having ins the NASCAR Nationwide Series.

Stenhouse leads the point standings, he’s No. 2 on the money list and when the series returns to Iowa Speedway on Saturday night, he’ll be racing on the track where earlier this year he earned his first Nationwide victory.

Yet Stenhouse can’t help thinking about what might have been. The 23-year-old from Mississippi held the lead late in three races since that May victory but didn’t win any of them.

“After you get that first win, you expect to win a lot more and we haven’t done that yet,” Stenhouse said Friday between practice runs on the .875 mile oval. “So we’ve been disappointed. Then, at the same time, we’ve been running consistently in the top five. That’s what we’ve got to do to win this championship.”

His biggest disappointment came last weekend at Lucas Oil Raceway in Indiana. Stenhouse led for 189 of the 204 laps in that race before Brad Keselowski passed him on a late restart and drove away to the victory.

Then came more disappointment. After thinking he had finished second, Stenhouse was dropped to third after a video review. Still, he finished high enough to take a three-point lead over Reed Sorenson in the standings.

“It’s just frustrating when you don’t cap it off,” Stenhouse said. “But I think with a little bit more experience, a few of those races could have very easily been capped off with a win. I guess that’s part of learning.

“This is our second full season running Nationwide. I feel like I’ve still got a lot to learn. I think going through those times of leading late and not winning has built me as a better driver. I think each and every race we’re getting better as a team. So it’s frustrating, but then again it builds us confidence, too.”

Keselowski had been scheduled to run here Saturday night but pulled out after breaking his left ankle when he crashed during a testing run in Atlanta on Wednesday. His doctor cleared him to compete in the Sprint Cup race at Pocono Raceway on Sunday, but he decided against trying the weekend double.

Keselowski won the first Nationwide race at Iowa Speedway in 2009 and was third here in May.

“It’s never good to see one of our competitors get hurt,” Stenhouse said. “After last week, I was wanting to race him here and be battling for the win. I’m sure if he was here, we’d be battling. He’s a really great race car driver. I feel like I’d like to beat him here so we could put last week behind us, but I guess we’ll have to wait for that.”

Although it might seem safe to keep things the same after winning, Stenhouse said he can’t afford to do that, so his Roush Fenway Racing crew has put him in a new car for Saturday night’s race. He doesn’t see that as a gamble.

“If you have really good race cars and you sit on them, everybody else is making theirs better to keep up with you,” he said. “If you’re not steadily making them better, I don’t think you’re going to be as good as you think you should be.”

Sorenson also won’t have the same car he drove here in May, when he finished fourth after leading for 77 laps.

“We had a good race car last time,” Sorenson said. “We took what we had on that car, applied it to this one and hopefully we’ll make it a little bit better through practice.”

Sorenson and his Turner Motorsports teammates, Justin Allgaier and Jason Leffler, along with Michael Annett will be competing for a $100,000 bonus. The Iowa race is the second of four designated as a Dash 4 Cash race. The top finisher among those four will wins the money.

“It’s viable. It’s there. Someone’s going to win it,” Leffler said. “One of us is going to walk away with 100,000.”