No wonder Tony Stewart has seemed like the second coming of A.J. Foyt all along–as volatile as he is versatile.
It turns out Stewart survived Foyt’s own kind of boot camp, at an impressionable age.
It happened in the winter of 1995-96, when Stewart was in sort of secret training to become the poster boy of the Indy Racing League’s stormy inaugural season. But it didn’t come out until after Stewart secured his first NASCAR Winston Cup championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Sunday.
Stewart heaved an enormous sigh, rife with relief and satisfaction–and, somehow, a touch of fire–and said, “The coolest part of this whole thing is that I finally did something Foyt didn’t do.”
That seemed natural enough, in that Stewart has been assessed as the most versatile American driver since Foyt and Foyt’s longtime archrival, Mario Andretti.
But it went deeper than just Stewart’s acknowledgment, false humility aside, that he is indeed among the tiny group able to excel in a 3,400-pound stock car one day, an Indy car half that weight the next, a sprint car on dirt the next, a midget on pavement the next and a sports car on a serpentine road course the next.
“Most people don’t realize, but the first Indy car I drove was for A.J.,” Stewart said.
Before Stewart stormed into Gasoline Alley for the rookie year at Indy that detonated his reputation in ’96 for team owner John Menard, there had been, well, this private little tutoring session, a five-day test at Phoenix.
Stewart was the embodiment of what Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Tony George wanted his upstart IRL to be–an American prodigy off the heartland dirt tracks, in the tradition of Foyt himself, to break the trend of foreign drivers into Indy cars.
So George prepped his poster boy by sending him to the toughest drill instructor on wheels.
“It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my life,” Stewart recalled. “It was one of the best experiences of my life too. The relationship I built with A.J. will last a lifetime.
“I never got verbally beat up as bad with anybody as I did with A.J. for five days. His favorite comment, whenever I was proud of something I did, was, `Just check the record books, big boy.'”
There, Foyt knew, lay the argument that abides to this day, deep into his and Andretti’s retirement, as to which was the most versatile American driver ever.
Foyt won four Indy 500s, the Daytona 500 (1972) and the 24 Hours of Le Mans (1967). Andretti won the Daytona 500 in 1967, the Indy 500 in ’69 and the Formula One world championship of 1978–which, many feel, trumps Foyt.
What neither did was win a Winston Cup. Even if either had driven an entire NASCAR season, the schedule wasn’t remotely as grueling, or as intensely competitive, as it is now.
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So Stewart gazed into a bank of TV cameras, going eyeball to eyeball with Foyt electronically, and sent his message straight to the old bull over the airwaves: “Well, you’re right, A.J.–check the record books!”
This is not to say that in those five days in the desert, Foyt actively taught Stewart to be bombastic, fiery, volatile, disdainful of media, bull-headed, abrasive, quick to express ire physically.
But Foyt’s personality seems to transfer by osmosis to young drivers under his wing. The late Dale Earnhardt was a shy kid from textile-mill country, more or less intimidated by the media, until Foyt clearly took a liking to the rookie at Daytona in 1979. You listened to them banter then, and you knew what was coming.
Thereafter, whenever reporters would scurry with wounded pride, bitten hard by Earnhardt’s gruffness, wondering why he was that way, I would always reply:
“It’s because he got his basic media training from Foyt.”
Clear cut: It’s a good thing Mark Martin lost the championship to Stewart by 38 points. That way, everybody feels better than if Martin had lost by no more than 25–the margin of NASCAR’s penalty against him for an “unapproved” spring at Rockingham on Nov. 3.
“I think that was important,” Martin said. “It would have been by 13 points [even if the penalty had been overturned]. I feel like they beat us, they earned it, and I congratulate them.”
But Martin’s car owner, Jack Roush, still is stinging to the point that losing the championship hardly even disappoints him in the aftermath of the turndown of his appeal.
“I have much less interest in a Winston Cup championship than I ever have before, based on the way I’ve consistently been treated,” Roush said. “But that doesn’t mean that my pain-to-pleasure ratio is such that I won’t come back and do it again.”
Of the 3-0 refusal by a National Stock Car Racing Commission to reverse NASCAR’s penalty, Roush said, “We wish we had a better system to adjudicate the issues as they relate to penalties and punishments that NASCAR deals out.”
The commission is widely considered a puppet court of NASCAR, and so, Roush said, “We have no choice but to go into a NASCAR court that has, over a period of time, been very much a rubber stamp of whatever the initial decision was.”
Roush hinted that he might have taken the issue to a real court if Martin had lost by less than 25 points.
Wait till next year: Kurt Busch has to be the early favorite for next year’s points title based on NASCAR insiders’ rule of thumb that a strong finish to one season is an indicator for the next. Busch’s win at Homestead made it three victories in the final five races and he catapulted himself to a third-place finish in the points.
His season total of four victories was one short of teammate Matt Kenseth’s series-high five. Add Martin’s single victory and Roush Racing finishes as the winningest team with 10; Hendrick Motorsports was second with six (three each by Jeff Gordon and rookie Jimmie Johnson).
Some rookie: Rookie of the year Ryan Newman, a more consistent high finisher than Johnson even though Johnson had more victories (three to one), says he never really felt like a rookie, having so much driving experience in other series.
What about his own aspirations for the overall championship to follow rookie honors?
“We thought about it for this year, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t think about it for next year,” he said after finishing sixth in the points.
Sounds a lot like the last driver to win rookie of the year and the Cup back-to-back.
“Why not?” Earnhardt cracked at the close of his rookie year in ’79. He won the ’80 championship.
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