Tony Stewart has become familiar with the Camping World Drag Racing Series during the past year, attending events, asking questions, and meeting the sport’s innovators.

He has attended Frank Hawley’s Drag Racing School at Bradenton, Fla., and gone back for a second lesson, learning to drive a Super Comp dragster and a Top Alcohol dragster.

And the sprint-car, championship-car, and NASCAR Cup veteran has learned the finer points, if not yet mastered, the handling of an 11,000-horsepower Top Fuel dragster at perhaps the most pristine racetrack on the circuit, The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

This past weekend, he not only witnessed fiancée Leah Pruett earn her long-awaited first Top Fuel victory since Aug. 2019, at Brainerd, Minn. He also made four passes down the fabled dragstrip in the Southern California cradle of the 70-year-old sport.

They weren’t in a nitro-powered car or a sportsman vehicle.

Instead, the motorsports legend had the privilege of displaying the Ford Motor Company’s innovation and performance expertise as the driver of the all-electric Mustang Cobra Jet 1400.

The prototype has been the baby of Funny Car title contender and entrenched Ford evangelist Bob Tasca III, who debuted it at the U.S. Nationals at Indianapolis last September and has driven it several times since then. With superb coaching from Tasca, Ford engineers such as Mark Rushbrook and Brian Novak, and the car’s builder, Pat McCue,

“I actually tested in the car at Charlotte one day and made five passes – three partial runs and two full-length runs before we had to stop for the day,” Stewart said of his EV boot camp at zMAX Dragway.

He said the person who “talks to you the most on the radio and that I spend the most time with” is McCue, the high-school shop teacher from Bothell, Wash., who built and has driven the electric Cobra Jet (as well as the General Motors’ Copo Camaro).

Stewart called McCue a “super-smart guy” and said, “The best part is he's literally walking you through every step of all the procedures, and his demeanor on the radio is so calm that you go through it and it just seems second nature. He has a way of communicating on the radio to you in a way that's very calming. And definitely makes the part of everything being different and awkward, it takes a lot of that awkward part out, because he's doing such a good job of walking me through the process. I've enjoyed working with him. All the group on the Ford side have been awesome to work with, but he's the one that I spend the most time with. And he's the one that's walked through the procedures on how to do everything. And he's a really, really neat guy.”

So with all his reinforcements, Stewart added to the lore of the facility, representing traditional motorsports and helping escalate the future – bringing it to the present. He finally was ready to make two passes last Friday and one each Saturday and Sunday to show his newfound skills but also to bring Ford’s Cobra Jet 1400 out of a Disney-like Tomorrowland into today.

“Bob had to kind of give me a refresher [Friday] on how to do everything again,” Stewart said, “because it's been a while since I've been in it and I've not driven anything that had this kind of transmission in it ever before, in any application. It's normal in drag racing, but it's not something that I'm used to. So they had to go over with me the procedures, both of them, the engineers and Bob. Bob has taken a ton of time with me to help out and be supportive with me driving the car. So he spent a lot of time with me [Friday] and reminded me how to do everything.”

After that instruction and pep talk Friday from Tasca III, Stewart took the wheel again and drove it with such ease that it almost appeared he had built it himself. Of course, he didn’t. McCue did. But Stewart received kudos from Tasca afterward.

Tasca said, “Not many people get to give Tony Stewart driving lessons, right? So, he's just very talented, obviously, no matter what you put him in. But it's a totally different routine than anything he's used to. Obviously, it's even very different than the Top Fuel dragster he's been driving. But man, he jumped in that thing [Friday], and he was like a veteran. I said, ‘OK, Tony, that's enough now. Don't go after my record.’ We ran 8.12 at 171, almost a 172 miles-an-hour, in Norwalk. Quickest, fastest run ever in an electric car to the quarter-mile.

“I even took a shot at Elon Musk,” Tasca III said. “I think he lives in California. I said, ‘Elon, let's race.’ But it's a lot of fun to see him out here. Great project Ford’s working on, and you're going to keep seeing that car get quicker and faster.”

Amazed by the electric-car’s speed and handling, Stewart always had respect for the Cobra Jet 1400, even before he learned its nuances. One aspect he learned right away was its power.

“It’s definitely something that's caught me off guard, for sure,” he said, looking back to his first association with the all-electric Mustang. “The big thing that you notice is it doesn't torque the car to the right rear corner when it leaves. All these other cars, because of crankshafts and the direction that the load is on the crankshaft, it twists the cars to the right and loads the right rear tire harder. So with the electric car, it just sits down flat in the back, which is nice, because that's what you ultimately would want in the perfect world, anyway. But it does that, and it doesn't have that torsional twist to it that you have in combustion engine cars.”

Stewart said the Cobra Jet 1400 still uses all of one’s senses, although it doesn’t bombard the driver with the sensory overload that traditional NHRA nitro-powered cars do.

“It does have sound, obviously. It's not near as loud as a gas car, by any means,” he said. “But you do hear the electric motors going in the back. So there is an audio to hear, as far as hearing the car run down the lap. You know, obviously the burnout sounds like a burnout. It's just you just hear a higher-pitched motor sound than you do combustion engines. So all of your senses are still working, but the audio part of it is drastically different than what you're used to and accustomed to, having something that when you hit the gas, it makes a loud noise. This is not near as loud, obviously, when it goes. So it's definitely different.”

He even said, “You can smell the tire smoke that's inside the cars as you're lining up still.”

Stewart trusted the Ford name and reputation already. But when he first took a look at the technology behind the technology on a visit with the Ford engineers, he remembers the awe and wonder of it.

“Yeah. I mean, to walk in there and watch what they're doing on the computers . . . I got a high school diploma out of high school, but that's all the further I got. But to sit there and look at what those guys are looking at and looking at the technology involved in that car and to think about what we're looking at down the road, it's something that when I was in my teens or early twenties, I never thought we would ever see anything like this,” Stewart said.

For him, it will be a curious exercise to watch the evolution of the technology itself but also the process by which it merges into The Familiar with both automakers and the public.

“Do I think it's got its place? Absolutely. Do I think it's going to replace cars that make fumes and that we can smell and see? No, I don't think it's going to replace that at all,” Stewart said. “But it's cool to know that that's where our technology is going down the road and what we're going to be driving in the future.”

As far as the popularity of EVs in drag racing in particular and motorsports in general, Stewart said if crowds are lukewarm to the notion at first, that wouldn’t be anything alarming.

“I think that's the way everybody is in society about everything that's different, anything that's a major change. It always takes people a little bit of time to warm up to. So I don't know. I mean, racing's still racing at the end of the day. We've seen over in Europe and everything the electric cars that they're racing over there, and when you're watching on TV, it's good racing. So it's the same but different,” he said.

“So I think it may take a while, but at the same time, the more mainstream it becomes as far as what we're driving on the city streets, the more relevant it becomes and makes more sense to everybody. So I think as the OEMs are getting more involved in the electric side, that racing will, as well.”