Tony Stewart has made a career of accomplishing every motorsports goal he’s set out to achieve. USAC multi-class champion? Yup! INDYCAR titleholder? For sure. Three-time NASCAR Cup Series driving champion? Yeah, been there, done that. He’s also won a NASCAR Cup Series title strictly as an owner. He’s owned Eldora Speedway since 2004 and can be seen priming that dirt from time to time.
Stewart has chosen the No. 14 for all of his race cars – when he’s able to dictate that choice – in deference to his hero and mentor, A.J. Foyt, the first four-time winner of the Indianapolis 500, a contest Stewart has come close to winning, but no cigar. He’s the sole driver to complete all 1,100 miles in the Memorial Day “double,” racing the Indianapolis 500 and Coke 600. A co-founder of Superstar Racing Experience, Stewart nabbed that series’ first championship. With 62 career NASCAR races won, 49 in the premier Cup Series, 11 in Xfinity and two in NASCAR’s truck series, Stewart is definitely one of the best to drive a stock car.
And now? This NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee is racing NHRA’s Mission Foods Drag Racing Series in Top Fuel, after a single season of Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series Top Alcohol Dragster competition. Last year, Stewart earned four wins and finished second in class, despite never competing in straight-line racing before 2023. Was anyone surprised? Only Stewart, who really hates to finish second. He did earn his first NHRA Funny Car championship as an owner when, in only the second season of Tony Stewart Racing [Nitro], driver Matt Hagan became a four-time champion flying the TSR Nitro colors.
Everything changed for 2024. Actually, everything changed for Tony Stewart when he fell for Leah Pruett, a Top Fuel racer who, until Don Schumacher Racing closed shop, had been part of that mega-team. Stewart and Pruett married in 2021 once the racing season was over, he started his new TSR Nitro operation for Hagan and Pruett in 2022 and they won their first title a year later. That’s lightning quick; especially for drag racing.
During the Performance Racing Industry (PRI) 2023 show, held in Indianapolis each December, Stewart and Pruett announced that she would be stepping out of her dragster cockpit after finishing third in the championship chase in 2023. She came close to taking the title, which would have given TSR Nitro a sweep in NHRA’s two nitro divisions, but she lost the last round of play at In-N-Out Burger Pomona Dragstrip to Kalitta Motorsports’ Doug Kalitta, who’d been trying for 26 years to earn a title.
Pruett and Stewart decided that she would take time off in order to try and conceive a child. Just like everything else this duo performs, their baby boy is due in November. Practice, of course makes perfect.
Now that Pruett and Stewart are in parenting mode, it’s time for “Smoke” to earn his first Top Fuel Wally winner’s trophy. He came close during NHRA’s just-completed two-race Western Swing, held at Pacific Raceways, Kent, WA and Sonoma Raceway in the California wine country. Stewart went to his first final round in the tough Top Fuel class at Sonoma, falling to three-time champion Antron Brown.
To get there, “Smoke” defeated Shawn Langdon, Justin Ashley and local racer Ron August Jr. at the same track where he won his final NASCAR Cup Series contest in 2016. Stewart was looking for a storybook return, but Brown’s 3.746 run on the 1,000-foot dragstrip beat Stewart’s 3.774 – despite the latter’s better reaction time of .071 to .078. Brown had Stewart by the 60-foot mark and by the lights had pulled out a .0214-second margin of victory, or about 10 feet!
“This was a much better weekend than I anticipated,” Stewart noted after the final round. “We knew after last week’s Seattle race that we had to regroup,” after he qualified tenth and was eliminated in the first round by Clay Millican, losing traction (after again having a better reaction time than his opponent) and clicking off early. In a true show of teamwork, Stewart and crew chief Neal Strausbaugh went to Hagan’s crew chief Dickie Venables, “who offered to help us. We walked through many things with our Top Fuel guys and Dickie.
“We needed a day like today for the team guys,” Stewart declared. “In the final, we did everything we could as we left on one of the beset drivers in Top Fuel. To leave on Antron in the final is very big for me as a driver. We spit a couple of [spark] plugs out at the far end and, if Antron had any problem, we were right there for the win. I’m so proud of the team and the morale is great. That was the key to success today. We gained speed this weekend and ran three 330s (mph). We’ll take what we learned and try to make it better. We kept Antron honest in the final and we made improvements with the car. It was my first two-car final, and I’m proud how the weekend went overall,” Stewart concluded.
As the NHRA’s Mission Foods Drag Racing Series heads for its penultimate “regular season” race at Brainerd International Raceway in Minnesota next week, Tony Stewart holds ninth place points, 357 behind leader Doug Kalitta of Kalitta Motorsports. From Tony Schumacher in sixth through to Stewart, only 15 points separate Schumacher, Clay Millican, Billy Torrence and Stewart from one another. The objective, of course, is to get that very first victory and move up the food chain before the Countdown to the Championship begins after Labor Day weekend’s 70th annual Toyota NHRA U.S. Nationals on the historic Lucas Oil Indianapolis Raceway Park dragstrip.
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