Taillights fade: A look back at Stewart-Haas Racing's 2009

We've wrapped the season, and so it's time to wrap up our look back. In a feature shamelessly ripped from Puck Daddy's Death Watch and Big League Stew's Walk Toward The Light, we're looking back on all the drivers. In the interest of making sure that this feature doesn't last until April, we're stepping up the pace and covering teams. And yes, I know there aren't taillights on Sprint cars. It's a metaphor. Roll with it.

Team:  Stewart-Haas Racing

Drivers:  Tony Stewart, Ryan Newman

Record:  Four wins, six poles, 20 top-5s, 38 top-10s

Season summary: Stewart-Haas was the surprise of the year, hands down. Everyone thought Stewart was out of his mind to start his own team, having seen the trouble that other owner-drivers had experienced, but Stewart began strong and didn't fade for most of the year. In fact, he ran so well that it's likely other drivers will begin casting their eyes toward ownership.

Where it went right:  Everywhere pre-Chase. Stewart's success out of the gate was unbelieveable and unprecedented, and Newman, while always a talented driver, wasn't ever expected to run quite as well as he did, making the Chase with relative ease. Smoke won pretty much all over the country, and made it look easy doing so. His 2009 was one of the more dominating regular-season performances of the recent past. Unfortunately ...

Where it went wrong: When the points reset in the Chase, so too did Stewart's chances of winning. All the strong work he'd put in all season was for naught, and he and his team couldn't get it going well enough to hang with Jimmie Johnson come Chase time. Newman, meanwhile, barely escaped serious injury when he went flipping through the air at Talladega in November.

Prospects for 2010: Outstanding. Stewart remains at the top of his game, and Newman is a reliable wingman. And while SHR will likely remain a two-man operation in 2010, it's not out of the realm of possibility that a Kevin Harvick or a Kasey Kahne might make their way to SHR come 2011.

Related SHR posts from 2009:
Welcome back, angry Tony Stewart! You were missed!
Ryan Newman bags himself a big ol' bass at Pocono

Next up: Hendrick Motorsports