Tony Stewart had much to say on Sunday following his second career Top Fuel win at the NHRA Route 66 Nationals at Route 66 Raceway outside of Chicago. In fact, the first question in the post-race took the motorsports icon a clear 13 minutes to answer, just two minutes short of a filibuster delivered by a Funny Car racer in 2012 at the NHRA Mile High Nationals.
However, Stewart could have talked another three minutes and still had the drag racing media’s full attention.
“What am I going to say that I didn’t just say right now?” Stewart added.
Stewart’s Chicago final round marked his fourth consecutive this season, where he has won two of the last four races. He is also the most recent NHRA Rookie of the Year recipient.
Then the reporter fired off a question, and prefaced it as Stewart has so apparently dominated other motorsports disciplines with extreme confidence, yet in the latest years of his career, he’s struggled with the same swagger as a drag racer.
And, just like his opening response, Stewart let it flow. After running a 3.694 to advance to the first round, he announced earlier in the day, “This isn’t as easy as one might think.”
In that one statement, Stewart confirmed there’s more involved in drag racing than stabbing and steering. In other words, “There’s much more involved than driving a straight line.”
“This is a sport that the drivers aren’t the ones that make the difference,” Stewart declared. “It is not. I mean that’s just a fact. I mean, the crewchief here is the driver everywhere else, and every other form of motorsports, the crew chief is what the drivers are everywhere else. That’s just a fact. My job is leave on time.
“Matt Hagen said it best. I got it… Two years ago, when I ran the Top Alcohol car in Indy, I was second in points to Julie [Nataas]. I remember we smoked the tires the first two or three runs of qualifying. I remember Matt Hagen going, ‘You just got to simplify. Your job is to leave on time, keep it in the groove, and try to turn on that win light.”
“It’s that simple for the drivers. That is our responsibility driving these cars. I was 70% of the equation in sprint cars, in NASCAR, in sports cars, in Indy car, in every car I’ve ever driven. You come to NHRA, it is literally like being on its own island and now the crewchief is at 70% of the equation. I’m 30% of it.”
Stewart had a good day on the job. After the 3.69 he ran in the first round, which was also the second quickest elapsed time of the round, Stewart won a double-smoker over Shawn Reed, and then left on and outran Steve Torrence in the final round.
Then he faced Justin Ashley, a driver with whom Stewart has a storied history, and while he got the win, he needed every bit of the 70-percent input from the crew to pull it off.
“My job consisted of going up against the best lever in the class today,” Stewart said of Ashley. “I was fifth in average last year, which I was proud of as a rookie, and my goal this year is how do I go from fifth to fourth or third, and it’s hard. I mean I’m going up against Justin Ashley, Sean Langdon, Antron Brown and Doug Kalitta.
“Those are the four guys that beat me last year consistently. That is a tough group to beat. Got the utmost respect for those guys and everybody that’s behind us too. We got an eight time world champion behind us with Tony Schumacher. There’s no slouches in this deal.”
Complexity aside, Stewart is not in drag racing because he’s bored. He’s head over heels in love with the straightline sport. And he doesn’t want a thing to change about it. Let the record reflect, he’s perfectly clear with a sport where comraderie amongst the competitors is paramount.
As he sees it, NHRA needs to be NHRA, and let NASCAR be NASCAR.
“When you line up against Justin Ashley, you’ve got Justin as a driver, you got Mike Green as a tuner, you got Davis as a car owner, you got SCAG as a sponsor,” Stewart explained. “It’s just a great team, a great program, a great partner for the team. It’s just a great package and you go up and line up against him and if you can beat him, that is such a feather in your cap. It’s not a normal win, it’s not an ordinary win. You have beat one of the best in the business. You’ve beat one of the best teams in the business, one of the best sponsors in the business. You just respect that whole program.
“I know NHRA wants all of us to have rivalries, and drama, and BS that NASCAR and all that bulls*** that they deal with over there. They can kiss our ass. They can take that and stuff it up their ass for all I care. It’s great. It’s great for them. It’s not great for us.
“We’re driving 300-mile-an-hour cars and it’s okay for us to respect and like each other and have to compete against each other at this level. I like that part of it. I like where I’m at. I like the atmosphere that NHRA provides. I’m very happy about my decision to be where I’m at.
“So when you go up against Davis’s team and you go up against Scag and Randy and his program and you race against Justin Ashley and I guarantee you I can go in my cell phone right now and there’s a text message from Justin Ashley and Mike Ashley congratulating us, and probably Randy as well and Davis. It’s the camaraderie in the sport that I think is underestimated. As much as NHRA wants the drama because they think they got [to have] to be like NASCAR, they don’t have to be like NASCAR. They have something that nobody has.”
Well, almost something nobody has. Like NASCAR, drag racing has its share of haters, and whether they are turning left or going straight, Stewart knows how to deal with them. He uses the criticism as fuel which burns inside for success.
“I think we all make very vital, critical mistakes by reading the keyboard warriors that are dumbasses that sitting there mother’s basements and don’t do a damn thing and haven’t accomplished anything in their life and tell you how bad you are at what you do, but they can’t tell you to their face,” Stewart said. ‘I’ve never stood at the ropes and nobody has ever come up and said, “You really are bad at this and you should put your wife in the car.”
“But I read it on the Internet that, ‘Why is he driving the car? His wife’s way better. She almost won a world championship. And they can kiss my ass. They literally, can kiss my ass. I’ll sit there and stick it out for them, too, because they don’t do a damn thing. They’ve never accomplished anything in their life. They don’t know how to work hard to be successful in anything. That’s why they say the s*** they say on the Internet. And to sit there and have to fight and prove these people wrong, that’s the pride I take now. That’s the pride I’m leaving here with tonight.”
If Stewart admits one thing, it’s the ability to express his true feelings. Of course, he’s being sarcastic.
With Sunday’s win, Stewart said he is reminded of the extreme differences between NHRA and NASCAR.
“When you line up against [drag racers], you want to beat them,” Stewart said. “We joke around saying, ‘Yeah, you want to put your foot on their throat and make their face turn blue.”
“But that’s competitors and that only lasts for three and a half seconds. But when you get to the top end, whoever loses, you congratulate each other and it doesn’t have to be cutthroat all the time. It’s respect, and that’s what NHRA has is these teams, these drivers, they all respect each other and that’s what I really love about the sport.
“It makes wins like today mean that much more because of that. That’s an element they don’t have in NASCAR. Those other drivers aren’t going up there after a win, going, ‘Man, hey, congrats.”
“They’re mad because they lost to somebody and that’s what you have to be over there. But it doesn’t have to be like that over here, and that’s what I really love about NHRA right now.”
