Bob Pockrass
FOX NASCAR Insider
Tony Stewart has spent the past couple of years training himself to drive a car that goes from 0 to 330 mph in a matter of seconds.
He’ll admit that it took him a while for his brain to process information as quickly as required in a dragster. Does that mean he can process everything quickly, now?
He’s not sure. Ask the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion about processing changing diapers, and he laughs about what his next challenge in the upcoming days.
“I’m trying to find every and any way I can to get out of having to change diapers,” Stewart said in an interview a few weeks ago. “But my wife is a very strong-willed woman, and she has assured me that I am not, under any circumstances, getting out of these responsibilities as a father and a parent.
“And I don’t blame her. It’s part of it.”
Stewart’s wife, Leah, is due in the next couple of weeks and the pending birth is the most exciting thing in the life of the NASCAR Hall of Fame driver. When they decided they wanted to start a family, Leah opted to step out of her top fuel car and Stewart, still a relative newbie in the drag racing world, stepped in.
It hasn’t been easy. Like any competitor, Stewart wants to consistently vie for wins. But he has embraced this new racing life. His NASCAR racing days in the rear-view mirror, Stewart has found joy in the challenge of competing in a totally new discipline where the car goes from 0 to 100 mph in 60 feet on its way to a top speed of 334 mph.
“The car is going down the race track, and your brain’s behind it going, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on? And how do I get caught up?'” Stewart said. “But like anything else — if you want to lift weights, you’ve got to work up to it. Your brain has the ability to do exactly the same thing. It is caught up now in the car.
“I know what the car is doing. If it moves, I know where it’s at. I know what to do to respond to it, but it took a while for my brain to get used to processing information as fast as it’s happening in a dragster.”
Heading into this weekend’s National Hot Rod Association season finale at the Pomona (Calif.) Dragstrip, Stewart sits 10th in the standings, having failed to advance out of the first round in 10 of 19 events this year. He has made the finals once, with his best finish a runner-up at Sonoma. He is a candidate for Rookie of the Year, but the season hasn’t gone as well as he wished.
“I’d like to say it’s going great,” Stewart said. “But it’s been a struggle this year. … . It was a big learning curve for me as a driver, for the team and the crew to tune the car to sit there and figure out how to make the car run better and perform the way that they need to perform.”
Stewart spent one year racing a top alcohol dragster and this year moved to the top fuel category. He has three victories in the top alcohol division.
“I thought at the beginning of the season that I, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was going to be the weak link of the team,” Stewart said. “I felt like the team was going to be better suited to win rounds and try to win races than I was going to be capable of at that time.
“Luckily, I’ve got a great wife that’s a great teacher, and I got up to speed fairly quickly on what I need to do as a driver to drive the car. We’ve just struggled.”
For Stewart, it’s the mindset that is the biggest difference between his former racing life and current one. He was used to 3.5-hour races. Now he does races in 3.5 seconds.
“I’d say on the sprint car and the NASCAR side of things. the driver usually ends up being 70 percent of the equation of the success of it,” Stewart said. “That’s because of what they do with their hands and feet in the car, and where they’re lifting and how they’re driving the race car.
“They can manipulate the race car a little bit to a certain degree and make up for what it’s not doing that they need it to do. The NHRA side is opposite of that. It’s 70 percent of the tuners and 30 percent the drivers, There’s nothing I can do as a driver to make it go faster, but there’s about 20 ways every run that I can screw it up and slow it down or cause something catastrophic with the engine.”
Among the challenges were a change in chassis specs that no one knew how they would impact the performance. And then there was something else.
“Obviously, you know, not having Leah in the car and adding a driver that’s a little heavier in the race car, we knew that would be a factor to some degree, just not sure how big of a factor that was going to be,” Stewart said.
Stewart doesn’t know whether he will run in place of his wife at the start of next season. The NHRA has adopted rules for how points would be allocated if a driver uses a substitute driver for part of a season because of a driver’s pregnancy or fertility treatment. Those rules would allow, in certain situations, for the points earned by the replacement driver to go to the primary driver’s season total.
“Obviously I’m not a woman, and I have no idea what childbirth is like and what it takes to recover from that,” Stewart said. “I’m learning more and reading more about it, and it’s not an easy journey to get back to the forum before you get pregnant.
“We’re still trying to figure that out, but it’s ultimately going to be Leah’s decision. The reason I’m driving the car this year is because I’m just the replacement driver. I’ve told everyone, I’ll drive the car until she’s ready to come back. It is ultimately her race car and her race team, and when she wants to get back in that car, it’s going to be sitting there for her.”
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
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Tony Stewart