Speed, Guts, and Glory by Joe Garner

Author:Joe Garner [GARNER, JOE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPO019000
ISBN: 9780446554091
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-12-14T05:00:00+00:00

Tony Stewart, 1999

Once upon a time there were certain rules about rookies. Rookies did not finish among the leaders in the NASCAR championship. Rookies did not pull attention-getting stunts. Rookies did not throw public tantrums in the middle of a race.

Tony Stewart rewrote the book on rookies.

When Stewart came along in 1999, no freshman had won a race since Davey Allison in 1987 and only four had done so in four decades. The last rookie to finish in the top ten in points had been Jody Ridley in 1980. But the last in the top five? For that you had to go all the way back to James Hylton in 1966 (second) and Shorty Rollins in 1958 (fourth).

Then Tony Stewart entered the picture and won, not once (like Earl Ross, Dale Earnhardt, and Ron Bouchard), not twice (like Allison), but three times, and made history when he finished the season ranked fourth overall, thanks to twelve top five finishes, twenty-one top ten finishes, and an absolutely remarkable run of fifteen top ten finishes in a nineteen-week span. And by driving 1,090 total miles in the Indy 500 (finished ninth) and NASCAR's Coca-Cola 600 (finished fourth) on the same day and later angrily trying to reach into the car of another driver on the track, he made it clear he was not like any other driver.

Stewart, who began racing go-karts at age seven, came to NASCAR as a proven winner with three karting titles in his youth (his first at age eight, his first national title at age twelve), then followed by four USAC crowns (in 1995 he was the first USAC Triple Crown winner, capturing the National Midget, Sprint, and Silver Crown titles in one year) and, most notably, the 1996 IRL Rookie of the Year award and 1997 IRL championship. But in his one season driving for Joe Gibbs in the Busch Series in 1998, he raised the eyebrows of skeptics with his inconsistent performance—he ran twenty-two of thirty-one races with no wins and five top fives to finish twenty-first in the rankings. Not bad, of course, but certainly not an indicator that he was about to take the racing world by storm. Gibbs, however, had been impressed simply by the fact that Stewart was more interested in gaining experience than earning quick bucks in the Cup Series right away.

Like Davey Allison, Stewart turned some heads by earning a front-row spot at the Daytona 500, but he finished only twenty-eighth. Allison had finished similarly but followed up with a pole position the next week, and after eight races he had already won twice. Stewart had no such magic at the start, with two sixth-place finishes in those first eight races.

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