One sign that Tony Stewart may be ready to compete again, following nearly two years of turmoil, is as obvious as an inflamed boil.
The man seems to be getting his grump back. The Stewart who just ignored a required pre-race weigh-in until NASCAR forced him to do it is the same cantankerous one who won 48 Sprint Cup races and three titles.
Asked to elaborate on last week’s incident between Daytona practice sessions, Stewart reportedly summoned up some vintage attitude, telling SB Nation: “Go (expletive) ask (NASCAR). Go ask those (expletive) rocket scientists.”
Ah, the melody of a champion in full voice, so like the eagle’s cry.
Might “Smoke” Stewart be fuming again?
Just listen to him address the question of never having won a certain Great American Race, a rather sizable hole in a resume of his quality: “If anybody looks at my career and says because I haven’t won a Daytona 500 that I didn’t have a good career, I’d want to say they really don’t know what they’re talking about.”
In a weird way, the more Stewart reverts to his former bad boy ways, the more it feels like the earth is turning properly on its axis.
The contrite Stewart — the one who returned to competition at Atlanta Motor Speedway six months ago after having struck and killed Kevin Ward Jr. in a sprint-car race — was uncomfortably out of character.
Nor was the hobbled Stewart — his right leg shattered in another dirt-track episode in the summer of 2013 — a figure to be reckoned with.
Don Rickles doesn’t do Hamlet, and Tony Stewart doesn’t do wounded.
As he approaches Sunday’s Daytona 500 and the start of the 2015 season, Stewart is determined not to employ a rearview mirror.
“We put the last two years behind us. As soon as the calendar flipped over, I started looking ahead, not looking back,” he said.
As a name on the front of the race shop, Stewart had a banner 2014. Driving for the team Stewart co-owns with Gene Haas, Kevin Harvick is the defending Sprint Cup champion.
As the driver who doesn’t like getting weighed, well, that has been an entirely different experience. Between recovering from the broken leg and enduring a lengthy investigation that eventually cleared him of any crime in the fatal collision with Ward, Stewart has lost his way to victory lane. He hasn’t won in 19 months, the longest such drought of a 16-year career.
The duality of his being, the joy of ownership vs. the struggles as a driver, is stark.
“It’s always going to be mixed emotions,” he said.
It had gotten to the point that the question had to be asked: How soon will Stewart just want to leave the driving to somebody else?
After all, Stewart is the same age as Jeff Gordon (43), who announced this would be his final year racing a full schedule. Neither needs that source of income.
But that’s where the parallel ends, with Stewart professing a far more one-dimensional existence.
“I don’t have a wife and two kids that I want to spend more time with,” Stewart said, drawing the distinction between himself and Gordon. “I want to spend time at the race track. The racing family is my family.
“We’ve had two rough years back to back. I don’t think I’d wish that on anybody. Deep down inside I know who I am as a person and I know who I am as a driver, and that’s what I want to get back to.”
Greg Zipadelli, Stewart’s former crew chief who now serves as a Stewart-Haas exec, said he sees his guy healing thanks to the therapy of the garage.
“That’s all he has; he lives for racing,” Zipadelli said. “There hasn’t been a lot of (enjoyment) the last two years. I think he’s feeling better, and that’s a big thing now.”
Stewart hates talking about the pain in his leg — “Everybody wanted to blame it on the injury last year, and that didn’t have anything to do with it when it came time to drive the car,” he said.
No, he can’t dunk a basketball, nor will he ever dance lead with the Bolshoi. But certainly he can drive a car. During a fifth surgery on the leg in December doctors removed the rod that shored the injured area.
“He’s got that spring in his step, and the most exciting part for me about Tony is when he walks,” Harvick noted.
“I mean, he’s running across the shop. No more scooters. No more limping,” Harvick said.
There is a current scarcity of excuses for Stewart. And the fact that a Stewart-Haas driver won the title just last year is further indication that he isn’t exactly driving a Yugo around in circles out there.
Thus, no good reason to expect a lessening of expectation from within the No. 14 car.
“I haven’t set a benchmark, it’s literally just go out each week and do the best we can and take what it gives us,” Stewart said. “Every year everyone always says, ‘We want to win races, we want to make the Chase, we want to win the championship.’ That never changes.”
He is in a mood to make that happen again.
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