All that potential, all those flashes of brilliance, have been coming together in recent weeks into one rocket of momentum for the mercurial enigma named Tony Stewart.
After an awful start to the season–a blown engine that made him the first to fall out of the Daytona 500–Stewart and his junior wing of the Joe Gibbs Racing Pontiac team have gathered themselves into the most dynamic force in Winston Cup.
They got up from the pratfall at Daytona to finish fourth at Rockingham. Stewart was even stronger at Las Vegas the next Sunday, although his finish, fifth, doesn’t show it. He led 76 laps and might have been in position to win if not for a twist in pit-stop sequence.
Then last Sunday at Atlanta, he won in dominant fashion–everything Dale Earnhardt Jr. could muster was no match for Stewart at the end.
It is reasonable to estimate that if not for Daytona, Stewart would be leading the point standings. As it is, he has shot from 43rd to fifth in the standings in three weeks’ time, going into Sunday’s Carolina Dodge Dealers 400 at Darlington, S.C. He is 101 points behind leader Sterling Marlin–and that’s not much of a margin, with 32 of the 36 races remaining.
After three tempestuous seasons of run-ins with peers and the media, Stewart finally has fallen into a pattern by which you can read his moods. He is of course most explosive after narrow or unjust losses. It is when his voice goes soft, to barely audible levels, and his words are deeply subdued, that you know he feels his strongest, at his best, ready to dominate.
In just such sotto voce he climbed out of the car in Victory Lane at Atlanta, whispering into the Fox microphones about how anybody could sit down in a Greg Zipadelli-prepared car and win. Of course, everybody present could see otherwise.
What is bizarre about Stewart is that his deepest humility is not exactly false–there are simply times when he seems overcome with gratitude for where he is. He is 30 now, and has been out on his own, racing, since he was 19, when his family back in Indiana could no longer afford to finance his racing, at the levels he was climbing through–the intense, but little known outside the Midwest, dirt-tracking ranks of the U.S. Auto Club.
He was thrust into the national limelight as the sort of poster boy for the 1996 Indianapolis 500, the big split between CART and the Indy Racing League. He was IRL founder Tony George’s prime example of an American youth, out of American heartland racing, who had been ignored by the mega-barons of CART because he had no money to offer for a ride.
As a rookie, he started on the pole of that Indy 500, after qualifying second–he inherited the pole from its winner, his teammate, Scott Brayton, who was killed during a practice session nine days before the race. The day before the race, I asked him how he could cope with the position he’d been tossed into, under such awful circumstances. It is hard for brown eyes to grow cold and hard, but his did.
“I’m a racer,” he said. “I’ve got a job to do.” He was 25.
Stewart shot into the lead and began breaking race-record speeds lap after lap, at more than 234 m.p.h.–this in traffic. In the car, he was fine. Out of it–after the engine broke in midrace–he was devastated, hiding from the media for a while, then pouting when he finally met with us.
And from there, from that crucible no one that new should have been subjected to, Tony Stewart was branded controversial, volatile, moody.
Beneath all the apparent complexities, he is, simply, a thoroughbred race driver. He left his beloved open-wheel racing, and the IRL, not for money, but because the NASCAR Busch and Winston Cup schedules simply offered a lot more races to run. And Stewart wants to spend as many waking moments inside a race car as possible–witness his obsession in recent years, on the last Sunday of each may, with driving in the Indy 500 and then shuttling by jet and helicopter down to Charlotte for the Coca-Cola 600 that same evening. Last year he completed all 1,100 miles of the two races.
But in the big leagues Stewart has yet to be a consistently dynamic force. He is nearing that elusive stage right now.
If the pattern continues, then there’ll be an ironic awakening for fans who have deemed him a bad boy, and for many journalists who have deemed him too prickly to deal with.
Tony Stewart, as a runaway winner, might just turn out to be the humblest, serenest, nicest guy in NASCAR.
Back in action: Steve Park’s return to Winston Cup racing Sunday at Darlington, site of his serious brain injury last September, will be emotionally charged for the protege of the late Dale Earnhardt.
He finished second in last spring’s race at Darlington, to go with an earlier win at Rockingham. So he seemed hot on the trail of fulfilling the potential that had been so heralded in the `90s, when Earnhardt brought him up from the modified-car ranks on the short tracks of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Then in a freakish crash in a Busch race at Darlington last September, the detachable steering wheel on Park’s car apparently popped loose, turning him sideways into a T-bone crash. He wasn’t wearing a head-restraint system–as he had in Cup races–and sustained a head injury that left him with slurred speech, and most of all the blurred vision that has kept him out of racing until now.
Pit stops: The Winston Cup tour’s rookie-of-the-year duel between Penske Racing’s Ryan Newman and Hendrick Motorsports’ Jimmie Johnson now has only a one-point separation (55-54 in favor of Newman) after Johnson’s third-place finish at Atlanta last weekend. Meanwhile, Newman is the only rookie who has finished on the lead lap in all four races thus far. . . . Old Darlington Raceway, with its true egg shape (one pair of corners much tighter than the other) is daunting to most rookies, but Newman looks forward to it. He has a little experience on “the Lady in Black,” in Busch racing. “I really enjoy places like that because you have to attack the track,” Newman says, in a strong twist on what veterans usually say of Darlington: that “you have to race the track, not the other drivers.” Johnson has never competed at Darlington at all. . . . Points leader Sterling Marlin has realistic hopes of leaving Darlington with the lead. In 36 races there, he has 14 finishes in the top 10, and a victory in the spring race in ’95. Plus, he’s currently in the best car of his career, Chip Ganassi’s Dodge.
