Tony Stewart returns to dirt cars
INDIANAPOLIS -- Tony Stewart knows himself well.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway officials had constructed a temporary 3/16th-mile dirt track near Turn 3 as a midget car play pen to celebrate the Hoosier on his final Sprint Cup season.
The two-time Brickyard 400 winner, at the track Tuesday for a media session promoting the upcoming NASCAR race July 24, could have waved the ceremonial checkered flag while prudently reminding himself of the 15 races he missed in 2013 when he wrecked a sprint car in Iowa and broke his leg. Or the three he missed in 2014 when he sat out while grieving the death of Kevin Ward Jr., whom he struck while racing sprint cars in upstate New York. Or the eight he missed when this season began after he suffered a broken back in an offseason dune buggy incident in Southern California.
Nah, he’d brought a helmet and fire suit and dicing up the track with former IndyCar driver Sarah Fisher and two-time USAC Midget champion Bryan Clauson proved irresistible.
“I was dead set I was not going to get in anything,” Stewart, 45, said before wedging himself into a Keith Kunz Motorsports midget car. “I'm addicted.”
Track president Doug Boles presented Stewart with a milk jug of dirt as a souvenir and a rapt throng of on-lookers gazed as Stewart ran laps for about 10 minutes, his first in a midget he believes since 2014. Stewart plans to resume sprint car racing next season in retirement after having not competed in the regimen since striking and killing Ward Jr., who was walking toward him under caution at a track in upstate New York in August 2014. Stewart was cleared of criminal wrongdoing but civil litigation is ongoing.
Sprint cars will become an important key as Stewart avoids the typical IMS distractions that figure to increase as he undertakes his last NASCAR race at the Brickyard. The week of the Brickyard 400, Stewart will busy himself helping official races in the All Star Circuit of Champions sprint car series he owns at Kokomo Speedway, just over an hour north of Indianapolis.
“I want to focus on racing,” Stewart told Paste BN Sports, while expressing his appreciation for the sentiment behind all the fuss. “I’m telling you, in this era, it’s the most competitive it’s ever been and you’ve got to be thinking about what you’re doing the whole time. I knew we had a two-day sprint car race weekend here and it’s the best thing I could do.
“Friday night, Saturday night, not be sitting in the motorhome, thinking about it, it’s the best thing I can be doing, is working a race. I’ll be up there with a headset on and I’ll be working in Turns 1 and 2 like I always do at every race, in the infield, so I don’t need all that other stuff. I’m one of those guys, the busier that you can keep me, the less you make me think about that stuff, the more productive I can be.”
Stewart’s productivity in his final Cup season spiked two weeks ago, when encouraging runs at Pocono Raceway and Michigan International Speedway culminated in a win at Sonoma Raceway, his first since June 2013.
“My mindset got absolutely locked in since then,” Stewart said. “When you’ve not won a race in 84 races, you think, ‘Man can I even do this anymore? Am I the problem?’ When you can sit there and outduel Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex and they’ve been hot all year, with everything they’ve done. When you outduel them there, you think, ‘I’m not done. It’s still there.’ We’ve got to put the pieces together.”
The three-time series champion said he was as much annoyed as he was compassionate for Hamlin that the race runner-up fielded questions about whether his error on the final turn was in an effort to allow Stewart to win.
“Yeah. More for him,” Stewart said. “I mean, I felt bad for him. Denny Hamlin’s never going to let anybody win and Denny didn’t really have a choice. I took it from him at the end. I didn’t give him a chance. But yeah, I felt like that was a little bit odd and I was surprised to see that and felt bad for him. I don’t think he deserved that.”
IMS’s sprint car racing era apparently ended Tuesday afternoon.
“This is a prop for a promotional event. It’s not for a race and it’s not for racing,” Mark Miles, CEO of Hulman & Co., which owns IMS, told Paste BN Sports. “I don’t think it will stay. If we were going to put a dirt track in, it probably would be in the fourth turn but we have no plans to do that.”
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