POMONA — There’s a rookie competing in the NHRA Winternationals who will be getting a lot of attention no matter how he performs.
But this is no ordinary rookie. This is Tony Stewart, one of the biggest names to ever drive any kind of race car. He has driven go-karts, sprint cars, dirt cars, Indy cars, NASCAR stock cars, NASCAR trucks, USAC cars, and won at all levels on oval tracks.
Now he is driving nitro-powered Top Fuel dragsters, moving up from the alcohol class after a one-year trial period.
Stewart used to spend 3½ hours driving a race car 500 miles. Now, at age 52, he spends around four seconds going 1,000 feet.
He spent nearly 45 minutes Friday talking with a small group of reporters in his trailer in the pits at In-N-Out Pomona Dragstrip.
Asked about the adrenaline rush he gets from drag racing and how it differs from other kinds of racing, Stewart had an interesting answer.
“You know, I have learned a lot about adrenaline,” he said. “If it comes in peaks and valleys, like it does in drag racing, it can be just as tiring as it is by driving a race for 3½ hours. Sure, there is a greater rush in drag racing because you’re going up to 330 miles per hour in four seconds or less. If you make four runs in a day, that’s only 16 seconds in a race car. But you are just as exhausted at the end of the day as you are after 3½ hours of driving a race car.
A lot of Stewart’s friends in other forms of racing thought he was insane to get into drag racing at his age. There is no senior tour in the NHRA.
But now that he has done it, he is loving every aspect of it.
“There is so much that is great about this sport – the camaraderie among the competitors and just how fan-friendly it is,” he said. “You come to one NHRA event, you are coming back. You can walk around the pits, talk to the drivers, watch the crews work on the cars. You can’t do that in NASCAR or any other form of racing.”
In his debut in Nitro Top Fuel two weeks ago at…
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