distane for Kurt yes you should probably believe it. When people started talking about Kurt going to SHR; I believed it would be a bad decision on kurt's part. I also believed that it would never happen if Stewart had to sign off on it. On the outside things appear ok between Stewart and Haas, but under it all some say that Haas was a little more than PO'ed at Stewart. His anger stemmed from Stewart continuing to race sprint cars after being asked on a few occasions to curtail his activity for sponsor purposes.

The bottom line is that cars that make the Chase get all the coverage the last ten races, and sponsors like that. You can win a race during the Chase but if your not in the Chase you get a victory lane interview and that's it. In the Chase you can finish back with Danica and you will get an interview.

A couple of SHR sponsors expressed concern after Tony's first sprint car incident that if Stewart was hurt this close to the Chase they would miss out on advertising exosure if the team missed the Chase. Well, Haas relayed those concerns to Tony who basically ignored them. Tony wanted to do what Tony wanted to do even if it was not in the best interest of the team. That set Haas off and he decided that he would just go and do what he wanted to do, so he took his own money and hired Kurt. When your net worth is 250 million I guess you can do that. Now Tony is PO'ed, but no one is going to admit it. This whole thing is going to make for an interesting season.

I still think it was a bad move on Kurt's part; personally I think Haas is using him and Kurt just can't see the forest for the trees. Kurt is smart with money so for what he is being paid I guess he is not worried about being bounced in a year or two. On the other hand someone just told me that they think that Haas is considering a break away team, so this whole deal might just be temporary. Haas is just positioning things at this point to wrestle more control of the organization and possibly even split the organization.