Peers heap praise on retiring Tony Stewart, 'the A.J. Foyt of our era'
Tony Stewart is about to conclude his final NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season in the least Tony Stewart-like way imaginable: quietly. Very, very quietly.
Stewart will carry a special paint scheme that says “Always a Racer, Forever a Champion,” on his No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet this weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway, but other than that, the three-time NASCAR Premier Series champion has been nearly invisible since being knocked out of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup at Dover in early October.
Friday at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Stewart will speak, his final press conference as a full-time driver.
Stewart said from the start of the season that he didn’t want to go out with the kind of fanfare Jeff Gordon got during his final season of 2015.
So no pair of ponies for Stewart, like Gordon got last year at Texas, and no prolonged celebrations. Just one more race and then it’s on to the rest of his life.
“Here’s the reality of it: It’s going to end, whether I’m ready or not,” Stewart told me in late September.
And so it is.
Just not in the way many people imagined it would end.
Stewart has always spoken with authority and always had a bold voice on and off the track, most times for good, occasionally to his detriment.
On the track, the numbers are unquestioned: Three NASCAR Premier Series championships as a driver, two as a car owner, 49 race wins, an IRL championship and a USAC Triple Crown title, among many honors. Unquestionably, undeniably, Stewart is a first-ballot NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee as soon as he becomes eligible.
Stewart has also been successful as a track owner, with the crown jewel of his properties being historic Eldora Speedway, the half-mile dirt track in Rossburg, Ohio.
“Tony is one of the drivers like Jeff Gordon that came over from open wheel and set such a high standard,” said NASCAR team owner Roger Penske, one of auto racing’s most astute judges of talent. “His notoriety and personality is just plastered across this country on short tracks, big tracks, certainly in NASCAR.”
“He was the A.J. Foyt of our era,” said Jimmy Makar, senior vice president at Joe Gibbs Racing, Stewart’s former team. “That's kind of the way I look at Tony. If it's got four wheels, he's going to get in it and drive it, and it's always been the way he's done things. So I just think as a race car driver, not necessarily a stock car driver, he's one of the best that's been.”
Along the way, there have been notable controversies. Stewart was seriously injured in a dirt sprint car crash in Iowa in 2013, and was involved in a fatal crash a year later in New York. Earlier this year, Stewart broke his back in an off-road accident.
In recent years, Stewart has also had some eye-opening — and hugely entertaining — moments on social media, showing off everything from his skills with a flame thrower to playing with big cats in his Indiana home to rehabbing on the treadmill after breaking his back.
Stewart has let outsiders — friends, fans and the media — peer into his world much more than most other drivers. It’s built Stewart a huge fan base and a fair amount of keyboard commandos quick to criticize him, too.
He’s always done whatever the hell he wanted to do, and sometimes the consequences were severe. But to his credit, when things got hairy, Stewart manned up, instead of backing down.
Stewart’s extensive philanthropic efforts have been substantial, although like the late Dale Earnhardt, he never wanted people to know when he did good things for people. Charity was something you did in private.
“He’s got a huge heart and I think that’s something a lot of people don’t know about Tony,” said Joey Logano, one of four drivers who will race for a championship on Sunday.
“As much as you see from the outside — he’s a hard-nosed racer — you see the drive and determination from that standpoint,” said Logano. “Outside of the car you see that he’s got a very giving heart, which is something that’s very cool.”
One of Stewart’s greatest traits is arguably also his worst: He has no filter whatsoever and says exactly what he thinks, consequences be damned. And like a lot of racers, at times that leads to what can be perceived as a double standard.
Prior to the 2006 Daytona 500, Stewart called out NASCAR and his fellow drivers and said someone would get killed if the sanctioning boy didn’t police the rough driving more aggressively.
And then in the 500, Stewart deliberately wrecked Matt Kenseth when he felt Kenseth had gotten in his way.
“Tony went out and said all that stuff earlier in the week,” Kenseth said. “If he`s worried about people`s lives and everything, and then he`s going to wreck you on purpose at 190 (mph), I wasn't too happy with that.”
“He started it. I finished it,” countered Stewart.
Kenseth isn’t alone.
“I’ve been on the really, really bad side of Tony and I’ve been on the really, really good side of Tony,” said Kyle Busch, the defending Sprint Cup champion. “It’s way better to be on the better side.”
Stewart’s outspoken nature made him one of the sport’s most interesting characters, someone who would and did say anything that crossed his mind.
At Talladega in 2012, disgusted with the NASCAR rules package being run then, Stewart went on an epic, deadpan rant, saying, in part, “I’m sorry we couldn’t crash more cars today. We didn’t fill the quota today for Talladega and NASCAR.”
Put simply, Stewart often said things other drivers would like to, but didn’t have the balls to.
“I could pull up things on this phone that would make you guys cringe about this sport that drivers talk about,” Stewart said. “But there’s 39 of these guys that 99 times out of a 100 won’t say a thing about it to you guys or to NASCAR or anybody else. And I’m the one guy who most of the time goes, ‘Man, this is a bad thing to talk about it and I shouldn’t talk about it.’ But I’ll get pissed off enough that I’ll talk about it, because I believe it’s worth talking about.”
That candor made him popular with many of his peers, although it alienated him to some of the others.
“To me, a guys who wears his emotions on his sleeves, those are my kind of guys,” said Johnny Sauter, who will race for a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series championship on Friday night at Homestead. “Tony’s been a huge asset to the sport. Nobody can ever deny that.”
“He has an opinion, which I love, and I think that resonates with people,” added Danica Patrick, one of Stewart’s teammates. “People appreciate that sense of authenticity versus not, and he brings it.”
But being the lone voice has worn on Stewart over the years.
“That’s part of the reason I’m retiring,” Stewart said. “Because I’m tired of being responsible. It’s somebody else’s responsibility. I’ve had my fill of it. I’ve had my fill of fighting the fight. … At some point you’ve got to say, ‘Why do I keep fighting this fight?’ I’m not getting anywhere.”
Along with the ups and downs, Stewart has made some very loyal friends, none more so than his Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Kevin Harvick.
“He has been such a big influence in the sport of auto racing – not just NASCAR, but auto racing as a whole,” Harvick said of Stewart. “He’s raced in grassroots series, World of Outlaws, IndyCar, NASCAR, you name it. He’s been a track owner, series owner, promoter and helped advance the safety of the sport.
“His voice in the auto racing world carries a lot of weight and his contributions are so vast that it’s really incredible,” said Harvick. “I’m lucky to call him my boss, teammate and friend.”
But the best description of Stewart might come from Jimmie Johnson, who has won and lost championship battles with Stewart.
“I wasn’t old enough to really watch Parnelli Jones or A.J. Foyt race in all these different vehicles and win and succeed,” said Johnson.
“But Tony Stewart, I was able to see that. I just feel that maybe he was a driver — not that he came along a generation too late — but he could have come along and fit in so well in previous eras and raced anything anywhere in the world and won and been successful. I have a ton of respect for him. I absolutely do.”
