By Al Stilley
Senior staff writer

Tony Stewart likes to have fun, especially at short tracks and dirt tracks.

The Hoosier competitor is a graduate of the Indianapolis Speedrome, the paved “bullring” on the Southeastside, where he was a USAC Regional Midget Series Rookie of the Year. USAC’s only triple crown champion returned to the track last year when being honored on Tony Stewart night. At the end of last year he won a B main and qualified for the A main at the prestigious Chili Bowl midget extravaganza in Tulsa, Okla., which he won in 2002 and 2007.

Even his Stewart-Haas Racing co-drivers realize that he thrives on returning to his roots to have some fun away from the rigors of NASCAR Sprint Cup competition and team ownership.

Stewart’s fun has proven to be costly and has tainted his legacy. 

He suffered a fractured back in a dune buggy accident Jan. 31 in Southern California while in the company of racers Greg Biffle, Jeff Gordon and Rusty Wallace and former NASCAR team owner Ray Evernham.

Stewart’s recovery will be lengthy, according to reports, and he is not expected to return to racing until the NASCAR nonpoints All-Star race May 21 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Meanwhile, Brian Vickers will drive the No. 14 Stewart-Haas Chevrolet in Sunday’s Daytona 500; thus, Stewart retires with never having won NASCAR’s most prestigious event.

In four years Stewart has missed races three times due to two off-NASCAR events and the latest accident. He suffered a broken right leg in 2013 at Southern Iowa Speedway in a sprint car accident and missed the last 15 Sprint Cup races. He missed three races after the mishap in 2014 that involved the death of a 20-year-old competitor at a New York dirt track.

The two-time Brickyard 400 winner raced in all Cup events last year but finished a career-worst 28th in the standings.

Late last year Stewart announced that 2016 would be his last full-time Cup season. He wants to race midgets and sprints, mostly on dirt, and would like to try off-road racing and take a few practice laps on a road course in one of co-team owner Gene Haas’ Formula One cars.

Weeks before his Jan. 31 injury he nixed racing again in the Indianapolis 500, where he competed five times with a best finish of fifth in 1997, the same year he won the IndyCar championship.

“Absolutely not,” he replied to the often-asked question. “I’m 45 years old, and that’s not the time to be driving in the 500. If I want to go to the race, I can go and I can watch the cars.”

Stewart’s Cup career features three championships, 48 wins, 15 poles and $122.1 million in winnings. He has not won a race since June 2, 2013, at Dover, 95 races ago.

“When I started racing I didn’t have a clue when the end would be,” he said. “The big focus this year is to have fun; I’ll be going 100 percent for the win.”

Stewart-Haas Racing has won three Cup championships in the last five years. The team’s drivers are Stewart, fellow champs Kevin Harvick (2014) and Kurt Busch (2015) and former Daytona 500 pole winner Danica Patrick.

The Columbus, Ind., resident will have no problem keeping busy in retirement. He owns Eldora Speedway in Ohio, co-owns tracks in Paducah, Ky., and Macon, Ill., and owns the defending World of Outlaws championship team and a national sprint car series.
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Stewart intends to have more fun in his last Cup season, which he truly deserves, but it will be painful.

By Al Stilley
Senior staff writer

Hoosier-born NASCAR veteran Ryan Newman has a degree in vehicle structural engineering from Purdue University, but he has mastered the mathematics of making The Chase without a win for the past two years.

The 38-year-old driver has not won a race since the 2013 Brickyard 400 in his last year to race for team owner/driver Tony Stewart.

Nonetheless, Newman has qualified for The Chase two consecutive years for team owner Richard Childress. The South Bend native came within one point of the championship in 2014 and reached the second round of NASCAR’s playoff last year.

Newman qualified for The Chase each year by ranking among the top drivers in points after the first 24 races each season. His best finishes last year were third at Las Vegas and Phoenix and fourth at Chicagoland.

“Close, very close, and closer,” Newman said of his most recent driving history. “We were more successful (2015) but we lost a little grip last year. We led very few laps (20) last year. We’ve got to lead laps, be among the top five and be in position to win.”

Newman is confident that the No. 31 Caterpillar Chevrolet will be in The Chase for a third straight year. He said he believes NASCAR aero rules with less downforce will help his effort.

“It puts the driving more in our hands and I like that,” said Newman of the rules package similar to races last year at Kentucky Speedway and Darlington. “We will have less on-throttle time, and the tires will have more grip early but then tail off. I’m all about no downforce, not less, like it was many years ago.”

Newman is the oldest and most experienced driver on the Childress team. His teammates include fellow Brickyard 400 winner John Menard and Childress’ grandsons Austin Dillon, who survived unscathed from a horrifying front-stretch crash in last year’s Daytona 500, and NASCAR Xfinity driver Ty Dillon, who will race in five Sprint Cup races this season.

The Indiana driver is in his final year of a three-year contract with Childress.

Newman continues to be among NASCAR’s most underrated drivers. During his 14-year Sprint Cup career, he has won 17 races, 51 poles and $86.9 million with team owners Roger Penske, Stewart-Haas and Childress. His first win was with Penske in 2002 at Loudon, N.H. He is a graduate of the USAC midget, sprint and Silver Crown ranks.

Like fellow USAC grads Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, Newman contends that the way USAC open-wheel cars slide around and the close-quarters competition helps drivers compete at a high level in the Cup Series.
Newman said he hopes that Stewart enjoys his final season in Cup competition and emphasized, “He’s not done racing, he’s just done racing in Cup. He’s a true racer.”

Newman enjoys hunting and fishing and recently took his 5-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, hunting for the first time. He is a vintage car enthusiast.
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He and wife Krissie have formed Rescue Ranch and Ryan Newman Foundation, which promotes humane care for pets and protection and control of domestic animals through education programs and pet camps.

By Al Stilley
Senior staff writer

The celebration of 50 Years of Team Penske began at a dinner at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., where employees and drivers – past and present – gathered to honor Roger Penske.

Team Penske began in 1966, a year after he turned down an Indianapolis 500 rookie test with car owner Clint Brawner, with the formation of Roger Penske Racing. Penske also retired then as a race car driver, a career that began in 1958 and included SCCA and USAC national road racing championships.

Several Penske-owned cars, including the winning Indianapolis 500 race cars driven by Mark Donohue and Rick Mears, were on display at the Hall of Fame. A display of Penske cars will be unveiled Friday afternoon at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum. 

Penske’s stock cars on display feature the No. 02 Pontiac that he drove to victory in the NASCAR 250 at Riverside (Calif.) road course, the No. 2 Ford (nicknamed “Midnight”) driven by Rusty Wallace to seven Sprint Cup wins in 1993 and the No. 12 Alltel Dodge driven by South Bend’s Ryan Newman.

Team Penske has won 424 major races in 4,103 starts, 487 poles and 28 national championships while fielding 85 drivers. Donohue led the way with 59 wins, Brad Keselowski 44 and Wallace 37.

Penske has a record 16 Indianapolis 500 wins, which were signified with the display of the Borg-Warner Trophy as part of the dinner festivities last month.

Penske revolutionized Gasoline Alley upon his team’s arrival with crew cuts, all-white shirts, an immaculate garage and innovative air jacks. The starched white shirts weren’t Penske’s idea; that was the way they came back from the cleaners.

The immaculate look as part of the Penske Way continues today, according to Penske, who said, “It projects the image that we want to be, and that’s someone who has quality and can execute at the very top of their game.”

Key Sprint Cup dates
The Sprint Cup season begins with the Daytona 500 Sunday at 1 p.m. on Fox. The two qualifying races at 7 p.m. Thursday on Fox Sports 1 will set the lineup. The Camping World Truck Series race is Friday at 7 p.m., and the Xfinity Series race unfolds Saturday at 3:30 p.m., both on FS1. 

The biggest stock car race in Indy, the Brickyard 400 is July 24.

Other Sprint Cup races in the Midwest are June 12 and Aug. 28 at Michigan International Speedway, July 9 at the repaved Kentucky Speedway and Sept. 18 at Chicagoland. 
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New Xfinity format
The Xfinity Series race at the IMS July 23 will have a different format in the hope of making it more entertaining and competitive. 

The Lilly Diabetes 250 will consist of three races – two 40-lap heats to set the 40-car field for the 60-lap final race. The top two Xfinity drivers in each heat will be eligible for a $100,000 bonus, with the top finisher from those four in the 60-lap finale cashing in.

The Dash 4 Cash will be the fourth and final bonus during the 2016 series.

The series also will have its version of the Chase, beginning Sept. 24 at Kentucky Speedway with 12 drivers and two elimination rounds leading up to the final four drivers vying for the series championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Only drivers who declare for the series, which eliminates declared Sprint Cup drivers, are eligible for the playoff and the cash bonuses. 

Charter system
NASCAR rolled out its new charter system earlier this month, which assures team owners with formal input in the sanctioning body’s future decisions.

The charter affects 20 team owners and 36 cars for the next nine years, similar to NASCAR’s action to lock in five-year agreements with race tracks. Four non-charter cars will compete for lineup spots among 40-car fields.
Co-team owner Tony Stewart contends the pact positions the sport for growth and sustainability and is good for the sports overall health.

Critics contend the charter does nothing to cut costs, improve Sprint Cup racing or address ways to attract new car owners to the sport.

NASCAR’s move is a compromise that also allows the recently formed owners council to connect with sanctioning body executives and officials instead of acting as an outside activist group.

Brickyard champion
Kyle Busch is the defending Brickyard 400 champion and Sprint Cup champion, which has happened seven times, including Jeff Gordon, 1998, 2001; Dale Jarrett, 1999; Tony Stewart, 2005; and Jimmie Johnson, 2006, 2009.

Busch missed the first 11 Cup races last year after suffering a broken leg in a crash at Daytona. The Brickyard 400 was his ninth race back and his fourth win. He also won the Lilly Diabetes 250 a day earlier.

“It’s happened more times in history than many other tracks that the winner of the Brickyard has gone on to win the Cup championship,” Busch said during an interview at the Charlotte Motor Speedway media tour. “I looked that up after I won the race and I was baffled by that. Then I thought that I had better not mess this up. Being able to sweep the weekend at Indy was pretty special; to be able to score the Cup victory there was huge too.”

The challenge to repeat as the Cup championship team is not lost on team owner Joe Gibbs who coached the Washington Redskins to Super Bowl titles in 1982, ’87 and ’91. The closest Gibbs and the Redskins came to back-to-back wins came in 1983 when they lost to the Los Angeles Raiders in Super Bowl XVIII.

Gibbs knows how difficult it is to repeat a championship. Busch’s competition not only comes from other famous teams but teammates Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin.

“The hardest challenge is to stay up there (on top),” Gibbs said. “In pro sports when you have a great year, everybody else is pointing at you and looking at you; they’re working their rear ends off to get it back. If you kind of want to sit back and feel pretty good about yourself – that’s a disaster. We are ready to hit the ground running. The way we look at it as a team is only one of our drivers won the championship; we’ve got three others who didn’t. So they’re going to be trying harder.”

Sprint Cup rules
The success of NASCAR’s revised aerodynamics package last year at Kentucky Speedway and Darlington Raceway has led to similar rules for most Cup races this season, except “plate” races at Daytona and Talladega.

Most Cup drivers are in favor of less grip, and many of them want even more reduction in downforce. Here are some of their comments:

Carl Edwards: “The whole art of driving a race car is to be able to manage the car through the corner, get on the gas sooner, manage the braking, slide the car around – that’s what all of us have worked on all our entire lives. As you take more downforce and side force away and add horsepower, you put more of the racing in the driver’s hands. To me that’s what car racing is about. It’s not about putting your foot to the floor and steering an engineering experiment. It’s all about racing and manhandling the race car."

Brad Keselowski: “I’m thrilled with the package for the full season. It places the importance on the driver to navigate the cars (because) they will be harder to drive.”

Ryan Newman: “You’re going to be trying to recover as much downforce as you can. The driver will have less on-throttle time. The tires will have more grip (early) and fall off. It will be a challenge.”
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Jimmie Johnson: “I like a car that moves around a lot; it’s a very comfortable vehicle for me to drive. I enjoy slipping around a lot. We’re going to be learning more and more, but we’re a little faster with this package.”

By Al Stilley
Senior staff writer

Jeff Gordon admits he will have butterflies before the start of Sunday’s Daytona 500, just like always.

Unlike the past 23 years, Gordon’s race day role has changed. The former Daytona 500 winner will be behind a Fox Sports microphone instead of behind the wheel of the famed No. 24 Hendrick Motor-sports Chevrolet.

“Race days won’t be much different, especially the Daytona 500” said Gordon, who grew up in Pittsboro, Ind. “I always had butterflies in my stomach the morning of the race, and I’m sure I will have butterflies before the start of this year’s race.”

Gordon, the only five-time winner of the Brickyard 400, retired last year after being among the final four drivers eligible to snare NASCAR’s Sprint Cup championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway.  He won a playoff race at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway and finished third in points – the best-ever retirement year of any NASCAR star.

He officially begins his new career at Daytona as part of Fox’s NASCAR broadcast team, which features three-time Cup champion Darrell Waltrip, retired crew chief Larry McReynolds and veteran announcer Mike Joy. 

They will be together for the first 21 races – through June 28 – of the season until NASCAR switches to NBC Sports for the second half, which means they won’t call the Brickyard race.

In many ways, Gordon’s race-day preparations will be the same with team meetings and last-minute briefings before going on air.

Waltrip reminded Gordon of one difference: “He won’t have the helmet on, but he’ll have a nice time in make-up.”

Gordon admitted he was concerned about stepping from the competitive environment of racing and into the broadcast booth during interviews at the Charlotte Motor Speedway media tour.

“With the live broadcast, I’m watching and analyzing and being a part of this sport that I have been so passionate about and have loved for so long that this (broadcasting) is an adrenaline rush,” Gordon said of his new venture. “This is such a team effort with so many comparisons to what I’ve done as a driver.”

The team had a dress rehearsal at the Camping World Truck Series race at Texas Motor Speedway. And Gordon was in the broadcast booth last year for selected Xfinity Series races.

Gordon said he approached Fox for the job. Executives say they believe Gordon’s experience as a “Saturday Night Live” host and commercials plus his limited broadcast experience made him a prime candidate. Gordon and Waltrip have a combined seven Cup championships and 177 wins.  

Gordon reflected in mid-January that he would make good use of his time preparing for the Daytona 500.
“It’s crucial for me to build this bond and build chemistry because I’m going to rely upon them to get me through the unknown,” Gordon said. “It’s not much different than being on the track.”

Waltrip said Gordon will notice one big difference in the broadcast booth.

“When you’re out there in the race car and you have that full-face helmet on, you have a small perspective of what’s going on around you,” Waltrip said. “He’s going to get to Daytona and see those drivers on the track and say those guys are nuts. It’s not the same as it is in the car – it’s actually better because you have the perspective of the whole field. They all drive crazy.”

Gordon, 44, leaves the Cup Series after 93 wins, 81 poles and career winnings of $152.1 million in 797 starts.
“No doubt, there have been some incredible moments and experiences that will be impossible to duplicate,” Gordon said during the 2015 NASCAR awards ceremony. “I’m going to miss having that opportunity to win another Daytona 500 or Brickyard 400. How can you even come close to what that’s like?”

His family life includes wife Ingrid and their children, Ella and Leo.
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Gordon began racing quarter midgets 36 years ago in California, then advanced to USAC midgets and sprints after moving to Indiana. He raced in the Busch Series before his first Cup race in 1992. He raced solely for Rick Hendrick in NASCAR’s top series.