In 1998, when Dale Earnhardt heard that John Elway finally had won a Super Bowl, he had a wonderfully eerie feeling: He would win the Daytona 500 at last.
Sure enough, on his 20th try, it came to pass.
Two weeks ago, Tony Stewart watched his buddy Peyton Manning walk off the field victorious in Super Bowl XLI.
“I sent him a text message,” Stewart said the other day. “I said, `You got yours, finally. Now it’s time for me to go get my Super Bowl.'”
Stewart enters Sunday’s 49th Daytona 500 as the best driver who hasn’t won it. He is 0-for-8 in NASCAR’s showcase race.
But he has been riding a feeling for weeks now, dominating the races of Speedweeks, breezing to victories in last weekend’s Bud Shootout and the first of Thursday’s two 150-mile qualifying races.
He is hurtling toward an answer to the same nagging question that beleaguered Earnhardt, Elway and Manning for so long: When will you win at the pinnacle?
“Now” has been Stewart’s tacit answer here the last week, with every confident word and smile, every turn of the wheel of his clearly superior Joe Gibbs Racing Chevrolet.
“No doubt about it, I think he’s the guy to beat,” said three-time Daytona 500 winner Jeff Gordon, who won the other 150-miler. “Tony is a great driver and does well in the draft. He has showcased that for the last several years.”
Just like Earnhardt in his time, Stewart has won everything but the 500 at Daytona International Speedway in recent years. He has 11 victories here, including the last two Pepsi 400 summer night races.
“I’d trade both Pepsi 400s to win the 500,” he said.
“I’ll be willing to destroy my car to win the 500 if that’s what it takes on the last lap. I don’t care if I slide upside down across the finish line. . . . This is one of those races that you’ll take any chance that you have to to try to win.”
If that includes taking out other cars, “Hey, so be it, man.”
But then he paused and said, “If I thought I was going to hurt somebody to do it, no, I wouldn’t take that chance.”
At 35, he has all but given up on his youthful dream of winning the Indianapolis 500 in his home state, in his beloved open-wheel cars, because of schedule conflicts with NASCAR.
“Now the Big Three to me are the [NASCAR] championship, the Daytona 500 and Indy,” he said.
There he means the Brickyard 400 NASCAR race.
“And we have two of those three goals knocked down,” he said.
He has won the NASCAR championship twice, in 2002 and ’05, and is the only active driver with multiple championships other than Gordon with four. And in ’05, the native Hoosier who still lives in sleepy Columbus, Ind., won the Brickyard 400.
So with only the Daytona 500 left to win, is he feeling more and more overdue?
He thought a moment.
“Not necessarily,” he said. “This race isn’t like any other race. It’s not your weekly deal where you can go out and win it on what you have. It’s a timing thing here. You have to be in the right place at the right time, you have to have the car to do it and you have to have help.
“You can’t win this race all by yourself.”
That is, the 500 is a restrictor-plate race, with cars drafting in big packs. Drivers depend on huge aerodynamic pushes and pulls from others to get them to the front. When they don’t get that help, they can go straight to the back.
Earnhardt, one of Stewart’s two mentors–the legendary A.J. Foyt is the other–was killed on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500 trying to help his son and Michael Waltrip win the race.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. chuckled when told of both Stewart’s do-anything vow and his resignation to fate. He saw his father suffer through the 19 years of near misses in this race, and now he senses Stewart’s burden.
“I’m sure Tony’s getting into the part of his career where his urgency is picking up quite a bit to win this race,” Earnhardt said. “The tenacity will increase, as my father’s did as he got older.”
Earnhardt Jr. won the 500 in 2004, but he had begun to feel a monkey on his own back.
“There’s a huge difference between coming in here having not won it, and coming in here having won it,” Earnhardt said. “We would come in here before we won and . . . man, there was this real empty feeling.
“You were so worried. Was this the one where everything was going to go right? I always had a great car, but I would make a mistake, or [the Dale Earnhardt Inc. team] would make a mistake, or whatever.
“So you’re thinking most drivers get 20 shots on average. It’s very worrisome, very troublesome.”
Now Stewart is called by many the Dale Earnhardt of his time.
“I don’t try to be Dale, but I respected him very, very much,” Stewart said.
For the last week, Stewart has exuded serenity. Maybe the tempests of his career have passed at last.
He had exuded tremendous momentum from the moment his private jet touched down here. The man known to his peers as “the pure racer” already senses a season off to a flying start.
Says Stewart: “I feel like maybe we’ll have the opportunity.”
Daytona 500 field
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RK CAR DRIVER MAKE
1 38 David Gilliland Ford
2 88 Ricky Rudd Ford
3 20 Tony Stewart Chevrolet
4 2 Kurt Busch Dodge
5 8 Dale Earnhardt Jr. Chevrolet
6 40 David Stremme Dodge
7 31 Jeff Burton Chevrolet
8 5 Kyle Busch Chevrolet
9 11 Denny Hamlin Chevrolet
10 17 Matt Kenseth Ford
11 07 Clint Bowyer Chevrolet
12 18 J.J. Yeley Chevrolet
13 1 Martin Truex Jr. Chevrolet
14 99 Carl Edwards Ford
15 55 Michael Waltrip Toyota
16 12 Ryan Newman Dodge
17 25 Casey Mears Chevrolet
18 13 Joe Nemechek Chevrolet
19 21 Ken Schrader Ford
20 96 Tony Raines Chevrolet
21 48 Jimmie Johnson Chevrolet
22 109 Mike Wallace Chevrolet
23 160 Boris Said Ford
24 26 Jamie McMurray Ford
25 16 Greg Biffle Ford
26 01 Mark Martin Chevrolet
27 43 Bobby Labonte Dodge
28 9 Kasey Kahne Dodge
29 45 Kyle Petty Dodge
30 19 Elliott Sadler Dodge
31 66 Jeff Green Chevrolet
32 10 Scott Riggs Dodge
33 41 Reed Sorenson Dodge
34 29 Kevin Harvick Chevrolet
35 6 David Regan Ford
36 42 Juan Pablo Montoya Dodge
37 22 Dave Blaney Toyota
38 14 Sterling Marlin Chevrolet
39 7 Robby Gordon Ford
40 00 David Reutimann Toyota
41 70 Johnny Sauter Chevrolet
42 24 Jeff Gordon Chevrolet
43 44 Dale Jarrett Toyota
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ehinton@tribune.com
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