Tony Stewart enters his Three-Quarter Midget prior to Tuesday’s TQ All-Star Series event at the Bartholomew County 4-H Fairgrounds.
Nicholas Shaw | For The Republic
As a driver in IndyCar and NASCAR, Tony Stewart had setup sheets with instructions about his race strategy.
No such detailed instructions are available for first-time parents, which the 53-year-old Stewart and his wife Leah Pruett will become in November. The couple announced on Monday that they would be having a baby boy.
“Everybody asked me, ‘What are you more scared about?’ Honestly, I’m not really sure, but it didn’t take long to realize I’m way more nervous about being a father than I am driving a racecar,” Stewart said after competing in Tuesday’s Three-Quarter Midget Race at the Bartholomew County 4-H Fair.
“I jokingly tell everybody, ‘I don’t have setup sheets for a kid.’ I have a lot of setup sheets for racecars, but I don’t have setup sheets for raising kids. Everybody that I know in the racing world, goes, ‘Even if you had setup sheets, you wouldn’t use them anyway.’ You just basically have to be like Peyton Manning. You have to call audibles all the time.”
Tony Stewart talks with fans following Tuesday’s TQ All-Star Series event at the Bartholomew County 4-H Fairgrounds.
Nicholas Shaw | For The Republic
Stewart and Pruett, a veteran NHRA drag racer, were married in November 2021. Last year, they announced that Pruett would take this year off from competing in an effort to become pregnant and that Stewart would take her place as a Top Fuel driver.
“I’m happy with the progress we’re making,” Stewart said. “I’m happy driving the racecar. Leah has been the most amazing coach you could possibly imagine. I can’t believe how quick we’re picking it up. I have a professional driver as a coach that’s there to critique everything I do and tell me how I can do better all the time. For a lot of these drivers that come in, they don’t have that advantage and don’t have someone there to coach them through it all. So I’m very fortunate, and I really love it.
“It’s an obvious statement, but I love working with my wife,” he added. “It’s fun to sit there and work with somebody you care about like that and learn from her. When I do something right, to see the smile on her face when we get back from the top end, that’s a payoff.”
Last weekend, Stewart had one of his best finishes as a rookie on the NHRA circuit. He qualified third and reached the semifinals in the Virginia Nationals.
“I felt like last weekend was our best weekend, honestly,” Stewart said. “Best qualifying effort. It’s the first time that I really went to bed on Saturday night feeling that, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to race.’ We had some moments where we felt like we were OK, but there’s just been little issues we’ve been fighting with to try to get right, and with that, we just don’t have a lot of confidence.
“Anybody in the sport will tell you, as soon as these cars go on the racetrack, the driver is the most important part of it,” he added. “They can take what they’ve got, and they can manipulate it with their hands and feet and make their situation better or worse by what they do. The drag car, you really can’t do that. The biggest thing the drivers can do is cut good lights and stay in the groove. If they spin the tires and do a pedal job, that’s where the driver really comes in, but on a solid run, you cannot make that car go faster, but you can sure screw it up.”
Tony Stewart, left, and Ronnie Combs sit on a tractor following Tuesday’s TQ All-Star Series event at the Bartholomew County 4-H Fairgrounds.
Nicholas Shaw | For The Republic
Stewart sits ninth in the Top Fuel standings going into this weekend’s event in Norwalk, Ohio.
“The crew chief (Neal Strausbaugh) told me this weekend we can win a race this year,” Stewart said. “So to be a rookie and have that opportunity, and if we can pull one off this year, it would be awesome.”
Earlier this month, Stewart announced that he would be stepping down as co-owner of Stewart Haas Racing and NASCAR. He no longer has a home in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area, as he did throughout most of his tenure of a NASCAR driver from 1999-2016.
Stewart and Pruett recently bought a house in Lake Havasu, Arizona, where Pruett had been living. They plan to split their time between Arizona and Columbus.
Last year, Stewart put his ranch home west of Columbus on the market for $30 million. The asking price has been reduced to $22.5 million, but Stewart isn’t sure it will sell, at least in the coming months.
“It’s on the market,” Stewart said. “I honestly don’t think anything is going to happen until this election is over. I know people are so scared of the screwy leadership we have in our country right now. I think everybody is paranoid, and I don’t blame them.”
