Tony Stewart determined to do NASCAR farewell his way – USA TODAY
USA TODAY Sports’ Jeff Gluck looks ahead to the Brickyard 400 and the story lines that fans should keep an eye on leading up to this weekend’s race.
USA TODAY Sports
INDIANAPOLIS — Camera crews from the local television affiliates were mingling by the elevators, occasionally glancing across the lobby and through two sets of glass door separating them from Tony Stewart.
A three-time Sprint Cup champion and two-time Brickyard 400-winner, Stewart sat in the photographers’ room at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and stared back at them as he leaned deep into an office chair, corded phone pushed into the crook of his neck. Most of the Indiana native’s day would be spent filling interview requests and discussing what will be Stewart’s last race here Sunday and his last season before retiring.
“Sure. Take it easy,” Stewart signed off, hanging up the phone, then turning wide-eyed to the two media reps care-taking his schedule, which included pacing several laps in a midget car on a new dirt track installed in Stewart’s honor near Turn 3 of the legendary speedway by IMS officials.
Stewart, 45 and in his 18th season at NASCAR’s highest level, has been determined to do this farewell his way. He watched last year as five-time Brickyard-winner Jeff Gordon went through a highly celebrated and intensively intrusive good-bye season.
If there was one part of Gordon’s victory tour Stewart hoped to replicate it was how the four-time series champion used a victory to qualify for the Chase for the Sprint Cup and advance to the Homestead-Miami Speedway finale with a chance at one last title.
If there was one part of Gordon’s farewell he hoped to eschew, it was the constant attention and pressure to succumb to ceremony as the number of races dwindled. For Stewart, there would be minimal fuss. Minimal pomp.
“I got to see first-hand the circus he had to go through last year,” Stewart told USA TODAY Sports.
Stewart lowered the veil for the media session at IMS on July 5 and was determined to cinch it back up tight as he approached his last run at his hometown NASCAR race this weekend, and for the march to his final Sprint Cup event in November at Homestead.
The Brickyard 400 weekend would be a sound test of his team’s preparedness and discipline to the plan.
“It’s flattering. It’s very flattering,” Stewart said of the attention he will receive at Indianapolis and elsewhere. “They don’t do that if they don’t like you and it’s flattering to have people do that. I appreciate that, but I want to focus on racing.”
To assure that, Stewart, his business manager, Eddie Jarvis, and Stewart-Haas Racing executive vice president Brett Frood consulted with Gordon’s step-father and vice president of Jeff Gordon, Inc., John Bickford, to see, Stewart said, “what were things he liked and things they didn’t like, if you could do it again, what would you do different.”
“I just laid out our strategy and our success rate, where we saw the distractions coming from and how we anticipated and traded our favors with tracks and NASCAR and various people to offset those,” Bickford told USA TODAY Sports. “Jeff’s whole thing was ‘I want to be competitive in my final year.’ Those were the goals and the only way you were going to get there without distraction. Your distractions impact your performance.”
Gordon’s camp beseeched track promoters to minimize gift-giving, but on several occasions he was presented with tokens, including ponies for his children, Leo and Ella Sofia, from Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage.
“I hope that nobody gives Tony a pony,” Bickford laughed. “He and Gossage are good buddies, so Gossage, it’s hard to tell what he’s going to do. Give him a ranch, don’t give him a pony.”
Bickford said Gordon and he considered ways to manage his final season when he first contemplated retirement five years ago. A major part of the process, Bickford said, was agreeing to return to each track this year in exchange for space and time to prepare for racing in 2015. That said, Gordon’s camp understood the interlocking agendas.
“The tracks are trying to leverage the tickets and you could see that,” Bickford said. “ So they do driver packages and name grandstands and do all sorts of stuff. I think we saw that coming and we tried to do things that were less distracting.
“I shared these stories with Tony. And these are really smart guys. They watched very carefully and they were heads-up on that.”
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Gordon is also helping Stewart’s wish for a lower profile at Indianapolis in an unexpected way, as he will come out of retirement to replace Dale Earnhardt Jr., who’s recovering from concussion symptoms, in the No. 88 Chevrolet for two races, beginning this weekend.
Indianapolis Motor Speedway president Doug Boles said Stewart conceded to the dirt track publicity day because it long preceded the race weekend. Boles said Stewart told him, “what I want to do is I want to win my last Brickyard 400.”
“I do think (Gordon returning) is going to allow him to focus on racing and not get all the questions, where on some level without the Jeff thing the focus would all be on Tony and he would be hiding,” Boles told USA TODAY Sports. “I don’t think he’s going to have to hide as much.”
Gordon’s promise to return to each track this season for fan engagement after concluding his schedule as a Fox Sports analyst had already put him in position to be energized at an expanding role at Hendrick Motorsports.
“He and (owner) Rick Hendrick spent a lot of time at Kentucky, really got Jeff fired up on the fact that Jeff saw it from a different perspective,” Bickford said. “He was on every driver’s box at Hendrick Motorsports, watching, listening to the crew chiefs looking at the strategy, what was going on watching the teams. So he got a new role and he was very excited about it. I think Tony is going to do the same thing.”
By the end of 2015, Gordon had celebrated lesser-known friends whom he’d met on his journey to stardom — hosting several old sprint car connections in a suite during his final Brickyard — but his final weekend at Homestead felt like a coronation. He was joined behind stage at driver introductions by three-time Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton. Mario Andretti pressed through the multitude around his race car on the grid for a handshake and photographs. Stewart does not foresee such a spectacle for himself.
“I love Jeff. Jeff and I are better friends now than we have ever been, and when you go with your buddy and he breaks your back and you still like him as a friend, you’ve got a good friendship,” Stewart quipped, referring to the January off-roading accident that cost him the first eight races of the season. “But our personalities are different. Perfect example: through the years, when Jeff and I worked with Chevy, Jimmie (Johnson) and Jeff and Dale (Earnhardt) Jr. they would send to the suit-and-tie events. They would send me to the factories.”
And while Gordon threw a lavish party at The Villa, Casa Casuarina on South Beach that pushed into pre-dawn hours, Stewart — if he doesn’t have duties as a newly minted champion — expects to again be behind the wheel of a motor home plying Interstate 95 north, making miles before the sun rises.
“I’m going off-road riding on Monday,” he said of the first day free of driving responsibility. “Most likely, I’m going to be in the motor home driving with the bus driver home because he can’t drive straight through to get the motor home parked in Georgia the next day.”
Driving off into the sunrise. Different, and his way.
Follow James on Twitter @brantjames
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