Motorsports superstar Tony Stewart was invited into the FOX Sports broadcast booth for the third time this season this weekend for the Pep Boys NHRA Nationals, and the adventurous, newbie drag racing team owner has embraced his newfound challenge.

"I'm not near as knowledgeable on the drag racing side as I am on the stock car side or sprint car side," Stewart admitted. "But at least on the nitro side, I'm learning a lot. It's a crash course, so to speak, minus the crash. But I am learning a lot in a short amount of time.

"The Pro Stock and Bike stuff, I have a lot to learn there. So that part I have struggled with. I know a lot of the riders and the drivers on the Pro Stock side, but just don't know a lot about the bikes. I'm learning on the nitro side."

Stewart admits it didn't take him long to realize the differences in talking on television about drag racing as opposed to his previous endeavors in various forms of motorsports.

"I think the biggest thing that's different from the NASCAR side is you got a three-and-a-half-hour NASCAR race. When something happens, you can take a couple of minutes to talk about it," Stewart explained. "Where on the NHRA side, the show is so condensed because they've got a lot of content they have to cram in the time zone that they have that the runs on a sub-four second run on the Nitro cars. So whatever it is that you're going to say and that you're going to talk about, you have to do it pretty quick, and you can't drag it out for two or three minutes because the moment's gone and passed and there's nothing going on at that point.

"You need to have three people in the booth trying to talk about cars. A cycle of the cars is about two minutes to two minutes and 15 seconds from the time they fire up till they turn off. So to have three analysts up there that are talking and trying to fill the people in on what's going on, there's a lot that has to happen, but in a very short amount of time."

Stewart's NHRA broadcasting experience has come through invitation and initially started back at the NHRA Arizona Nationals in February. What was supposed to be three qualifying pairs expanded into an entire nitro session.

While Stewart enjoys talking about drag racing, it's a temporary endeavor.

"I love being down with my teams," Stewart explained. "Obviously, not being there on the line when they're running is something different. That was a different experience for me to not be with our cars when they ran. So I think it's something we could do here or there, but I don't know that it's something that we would look at doing full time."

One thing Stewart fully understands is that no matter the talent of the commentators, no one can truly convey the in-person drag racing experience.

"An NHRA weekend, it's ten times better to be at the races than to see it on TV," Stewart said with a high level of enthusiasm. "If you like it on TV, you will absolutely go crazy and love it in person because you get the sights, the smells, the vibration, the concussion from the engines, the things, the senses that you don't get that feel from watching it on TV.

"To know you can go to an NHRA race and you buy a ticket, and that ticket gets you everywhere. You go in the pits. It's not like NASCAR, where you buy a ticket, you got a seat you sit in and you don't even get near the pit area. At any NHRA race, you buy a ticket; you go in the pits; you go right up to the cars, the drivers, and all that. It's just a very, very different and very unique experience."