Smoke signals: Stewart down with getting dirty
Tony Stewart is back.
Stewart said Monday that he intends to do more sprint car racing this season following a victory and a third-place finish at two dirt races in Michigan last weekend.
The three-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion spent nearly a full hour on the phone with reporters Monday afternoon as he drove towards Eldora Speedway, the historic dirt track he owns in Rossburg, Ohio.
Wednesday night, Eldora will host the second annual 1-800 CarCash Mudsummer Classic, one of the biggest races of the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series schedule.
Stewart, who last year planned to run more than 100 races before being sidelined by a crash in a sprint car race last August, clearly was pleased to be back on dirt, where he cut his teeth as young racer. Especially with his victory Friday night at Tri-City Motor Speedway in Auburn, Mich., which he followed up with a third-place run third behind Randy Hannagan and Dustin Daggett in the SOD/N.R.A. Engine Pro Challenge at Crystal Motor Speedway, also in Michigan.
"It felt great," Stewart said when asked by FOXSports.com how it felt to be racing his sprint car again. "It wasn't a World of Outlaws race or a big-paying race by any means," Stewart said. "But there were some good cars there that we had to race to win. And we got a little bit of luck. We were probably going to run second but the guy who led the race got pushed off the track by a lapped car."
Stewart said this past weekend was a harbinger of things to come as far as picking up additional races. But he said that going forward, he will be more circumspect about the events he enters, and his Tony Stewart Racing team has made his cars much safer.
"It was neat to get back in the car, finally, in a scenario that was low pressure," said Stewart. "And I just got to kind of go in and race for a couple nights and really enjoyed it. It felt really good."
Stewart admitted he chose the two Michigan races because they weren't as competitive and pressure-filled as the World Of Outlaws series races that ran the same weekend in Pennsylvania. Stewart said coming back and racing WoO cars in the first month would have been "suicidal."
As for additional dirt races, look for more to come before the end of the season. Stewart said he and Stewart-Haas Racing competition director Greg Zipadelli have worked on plans to allow Stewart back on dirt.
"I've got some more on my schedule," Stewart. "Not as many as I was originally wanting to run, but I think I've kind of worked with Zippy and sat down with our management and just trying to pick some places that we knew might not be quite as high risk as others because of speed and everything. So we tried to pick some tracks that we thought might be a little slower.
"And there are some races on there that I really have my heart set on running, but I've tried to be smart about where we're going. As I said before, we've done a lot of things safety-wise in the cars that I feel very comfortable with too. I'm just trying to be smart with the amount of races I'm going to run the rest of the year."
As for the pain in Stewart's right leg, which suffered a double compound fracture in a crash last year, Stewart said it continues to hurt.
"I still deal with pain every day, but that's something that's not even going to probably go away by the end of the year," said Stewart. "The reality of it is there might be a point where it will never totally go away, but it doesn't keep me from doing what I love to do."
