Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon set to race for final time together at Martinsville
The numbers speak for themselves: Seven NASCAR Premier Series championships, 96 poles, 142 race victories, 512 top fives and 37,755 laps led between Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart.
And it’s all about to come to an end.
In all likelihood, Sunday’s Goody’s Fast Relief 500 at Martinsville Speedway will be the last time Gordon and Stewart race each other in NASCAR’s top division and it will probably be Gordon’s final NASCAR race, period.
Gordon retired last year, capping his final full season with an electrifying victory at Martinsville and a run all the way to the championship race at Homestead-Miami Speedway, where he finished third in points behind Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick.
Earlier this year, the four-time champion and 93-race winner was drafted by his former boss, Rick Hendrick, to fill in for the injured Dale Earnhardt Jr. But Gordon has made it quite clear his future is no longer centered around driving a race car.
Ditto for Stewart, at least not in NASCAR, where he has three championships and 49 race victories, but is retiring at the end of the year.
Next year, Stewart said he’ll run a limited schedule of races, probably 40 to 50, in a wide range of series, including dirt sprint cars and late models. But don’t expect him to race much in NASCAR, if at all.
Stewart said he’s booked his first race, which will be on asphalt, driving a car someone else owns. Beyond that he’s been mum on specifics, although in an interview with a handful of reporters last month in Charlotte, Stewart admitted he isn’t having much fun these days in the cockpit of his Cup car.
Stewart said in the old days, if his car was bad in practice on Friday, he and then-crew chief Greg Zipadelli could work on it all weekend to get competitive by Sunday. Nowadays, Stewart, how the car performs off the truck on Friday is how it will be all weekend
“There’s nothing I can do to fix it. That’s what’s so frustrating for me as a driver,” said Stewart. “That’s part of why I’m ready to do something different. It’s because I can’t make a difference any more. I can’t do different things with my feet, different things with my hands and run a different line and fix the problem.
“I used to be able to do that. I can’t do that any more. You just get so frustrated you can’t see straight. It’s just extremely frustrating because you’ve tried everything you know how.”
Stewart qualified for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup this year, but went out in the first round, not the storybook ending he and his fans hoped for.
Frustrated or not, Stewart has four races left, but Martinsville is it for Gordon.
And after his remarkable victory at the paper-clipped shaped track last year, Gordon thinks he might be able to win there for the 10th time in his career.
“You kind of like to leave a place with a win and I definitely don’t want to mess that up, but it’s also a track that I like and feel confident at,” said Gordon.
“I don’t see why we couldn’t go there and contend for a win,” Gordon said. “We won there last year and I don’t think a lot has changed. The question is, ‘Were we the best car there?’ To me, I think we’d have to be a little bit better than we were last year to be in that position.”
On Sunday, we’ll find out just how good the cars are for Stewart and Gordon, and whether or not they have any racing luck. The odds don’t favor either of them winning, but if one of them did, it would be a huge story, one embraced by a lot of NASCAR fans. We’ll see what happens then.
