Stewart admits 'I'm addicted' to dirt racing at Indy appearance
Tony Stewart insisted he had no plans to get behind the wheel of a midget race car during a promotional appearance at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Tuesday.
But that left one question hanging: Why, then, did Stewart have his people bring a helmet and fire suit with him to IMS, where officials had constructed a temporary 3/16th-mile dirt track near Turn 3 to celebrate Stewart's final NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season?
Stewart himself had the easy answer to that.
"I was dead set I was not going to get in anything," Stewart told USA Today writer Brant James before climbing into a Keith Kunz Motorsports midget car. "I'm addicted."
Then Stewart took to the track to take a few hot laps along with former IndyCar driver Sarah Fisher and two-time USAC champion Bryan Clauson.
Track president Doug Boles presented Stewart with a milk jug of dirt as a souvenir.
Stewart ran laps for about 10 minutes and then told reporters those were his first such laps since an incident in August of 2014 when the sprint car he was driving struck and killed fellow driver Kevin Ward Jr. at a dirt track in upstate. Stewart eventually was cleared of criminal wrongdoing in that incident, but civil litigation is ongoing.
Stewart, 45, is retiring from the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series as a driver after this season. The three-time Cup champion who also is co-owner of Stewart-Haas Racing has said he will continue driving on dirt and in other types of racing.
"Yeah, I'm still going to race," Stewart told Tom Jensen of FOXSports.com last September. "I'm not retiring from racing; I'm just retiring from the Cup Series. There's great racing across the country and there's neat marquee events that you look at in the paper, and you're like, 'Man, it would be really cool to try that.' We're now going to have that opportunity."
Sadly, it just doesn't appear he will have it at the IMS dirt track that he obviously enjoyed so much on Tuesday.
Afterward, track officials made it clear that while the track was constructed more or less as "a gift" to Stewart to commemorate his final Cup season, it was built for promotional purposes only and likely will be bulldozed in the near future.
And there @TonyStewart goes #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/ap6X2R450g
— brant james (@brantjames) July 5, 2016
