Ultimately, winning the April 16 NHRA Four-Wide Nationals at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway wasn’t about adding an NHRA “Wally” trophy to Tony Stewart’s extensive collection of auto-racing hardware.
It wasn’t about proving Stewart can excel at drag racing or even in the sometimes-chaotic spectacle of four cars blasting down the drag strip at the same time rather than the traditional two. Nor was it about dominating the NHRA.
Top Alcohol Dragster is a highly competitive sportsman class, and Stewart didn’t make the field of 16 until the second day of qualifying.
It wasn’t about completing the cycle of claiming victory at every venue on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway property in several different forms of motorsports. (He won USAC sprint car and USAC midget races in the same night on the paved Bullring (2002), recorded his first USAC Silver Crown victory (1997) and topped an ASCS 360 winged sprint car feature (2010) on the dirt track, notched a NASCAR Cup Series victory on the superspeedway (2012) and won the NHRA Top Alcohol Dragster final (2023) during the four-wide drag-racing spectacle. He also clinched his only IndyCar championship at Las Vegas in 1997, although Eliseo Salazar won that finale.)
It wasn’t even about closing the deal after finishing runner-up to first-time winner Madison Payne last fall at The Strip in his first drag race.
It was about freedom. It was the peak of his too-long-journey to contentment. It was about that certain sense of serenity that people spend a lifetime seeking and seldom find. Tony Stewart finally could be in that sweet spot — winning at the race track and winning in life. And at that moment, nothing else mattered.
Ever since he met Top Fuel racer Leah Pruett, who’s now his wife, and admittedly fell in love with drag racing and all its trimmings, Stewart has focused on the straightline sport. He now manages his two-car nitro operation that includes three-time Funny Car champion and current class dominator Matt Hagan, while competing in the Top Alcohol Dragster class with McPhillips Racing. He has made test passes in an 11,000-horsepower Top Fuel dragster but says he’s not yet ready to graduate to that plateau.
Stewart has asked loads of questions, sought advice from the mechanical experts, business leaders and successful drivers in the sport. He has riveted his attention to the knowledge he has gained. He has immersed himself in the culture — and he couldn’t be happier.
Furthermore, he doesn’t care if his business associates in other endeavors are weary of hearing about his newly discovered excitement for NHRA drag racing.
“I don’t give a shit. I don’t care if NASCAR is mad. I don’t care if anybody’s mad. I’m having fun, living my life now,” Stewart said.
“I’m able to control my life. I don’t have to do all the things that I had to do with my previous jobs. I have more control of my life,” he continued, as proud of this achievement as he was of out-legging runner-up Todd Bruce in the final by three ten-thousandths of a second. “I have great teammates that drive for us, a great wife, and (Pruett and Hagan) have been the best teachers you can ask for and get advice from.
“They all know I’m having fun. I think it’s the opposite of what you thought,” he said. “The comment I get the most is how happy I am: ‘You look happy. You look at peace.’ And I haven’t had that for a long time. So I’m at a very good spot in my life right now.”
Stewart hit the daily double that winning Sunday in Las Vegas. Minutes after he grabbed the Top Alcohol Dragster trophy, Hagan put the team’s Haas Automation Dodge Hellcat Funny Car into the winner’s circle, establishing his command over the class with his third victory in the season’s first four races.
It was the two-year-old Tony Stewart Racing team’s first double victory, as the boss and Hagan joined Top Fuel’s Antron Brown and Pro Stock’s Dallas Glenn in the winner’s circle.
To see Stewart a bit vulnerable was a sight in itself. As he climbed from his Mobil 1 dragster at the top end of the track, Stewart said later, he felt a little lost.
Borrowing a line from the movie “Talladega Nights,” Stewart wisecracked, “I feel like Ricky Bobby. I don’t know what to do with my hands.” He said he wasn’t sure what to do, where to stand or go, how to behave with his first wood-and-brass statue that commemorates NHRA founder Wally Parks. He laughed at the thought — imagine, after all these years, all these successes, winning felt so new to him.
But he said, “I got tired of looking at Leah’s Wallys, and I wanted to know what it feels like to have one of my own.”