DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — For a moment when I saw Tony Stewart in November and asked him about racing a truck at Daytona, I had the feeling I looked at him as if he had two or three heads.
As my camera rolled, Stewart declined to answer at the time about why he would think about doing it, but certainly my reaction wasn’t the only one.
Apparently the reaction is common. Stewart described in a Dodge-moderated teleconference with reporters last month that his wife, Leah, also looked at him with some skepticism.
“She looked at me like I had three heads,” Stewart said. “So it took a little bit of convincing to convince her that I was serious about it.”
Tony Stewart is a three-time Cup Series champion.
Oh wait, that actually was about him just racing a truck again. Not even at Daytona. And then she gave him another look when she heard about the plan for him to race for Kaulig Racing in the season opener Friday night.
“She’s like, ‘Why would you do that?’” Stewart said. “And she goes, ‘You’ve always told me it’s about a 70 percent chance you’re going to get wrecked out of any race at Daytona.’”
So why is Stewart doing it? It’s no secret his NHRA drag racing team exists at least in part because of the investment from Dodge, the sister company to Ram, which enters the trucks for the 2026 season with an eye on returning Dodge to Cup in 2027 or 2028.
The three-time Cup champion hasn’t raced anything in NASCAR since 2016, and he figures at least he knows the draft at Daytona.
“All these guys that are running the truck series, they know the handling characteristics of these trucks,” Stewart said. “But when you go to a place like Daytona and Talladega, they aren’t necessarily the same handling characteristics and the things that you truly need to know about that is the draft.
“And it doesn’t matter how much technology changes. The one thing that doesn’t change at Daytona is the air. So I think our record book shows we had a pretty good success rate at Daytona, and at least that we understood that part of it.”
It will be cool to see Stewart in the truck race but also a little scary. It’s no secret that sometimes truck superspeedway races can morph into wreckfests. And at age 54, with a 15-month-old son and a vibrant NHRA team as well as a sprint-car team, is he taking too big of a risk?
Stewart, who knows that his racing days are nearing an end, has never shied away from risks and part of him thinks this will be cool.
Tony Stewart is returning to NASCAR for the Daytona truck race.
Of course, there’s the big question mark of why even return to NASCAR considering what came out in the 23XI/Front Row antitrust lawsuit against the sanctioning body. Text messages revealed NASCAR brass wanted to “put a knife” in Stewart’s SRX Series that several NASCAR drivers participated in — something that NASCAR felt could impact its television rights negotiations if drivers continued to participate in other nationally televised stock-car events, albeit on a much smaller scale at smaller tracks than Cup typically visits.
“I think everybody that’s on this call understands I didn’t have the best relationship with NASCAR, and surely, over the last 12 months, have had more reason to not have the best of relationships,” Stewart said. “But still, at the end of the day, there were parts of the racing and people there that made it worthwhile — and the tracks and the cars, there were a lot of aspects that I truly do still miss to this day of it.”
For young fans and his biggest fans, it will be a treat to see Stewart race the truck. He won’t even rule out another appearance later in the year.
And if Stewart really wants to do it, then great — he’s earned the right to do what he wants. But let’s not hope he’s not doing it too often as a favor or in hopes of making sure he keeps his Dodge support. Doing it once as a bit of thanks and strengthening a relationship makes sense. But there’s a lot of risk for that to be the answer.
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