1,000 Greatest Drivers: Tony Stewart

I still think his career outside NASCAR is overrated.

In my halcyon days of youth, Stewart was one of my many favorite NASCAR drivers. I believe I’ve mentioned here before that I was a bandwagon jumper. I started as a Dale Earnhardt fan in 1994 just because in the first race I ever watched (the Pepsi 400) the #3 car finished in third place and I liked the symmetry therein or something. After I learned more about Earnhardt’s obnoxious personality, I switched to Mark Martin in 1997, but I guess I got tired of him because he was a little boring. Then when Stewart was a rookie, he became my favorite in 1999 and it made sense because not only was he the hottest new NASCAR talent seen in years, but that year (and only that year) he actually looked clean-cut and not like a big bully. I remember the biggest “scandal” from that year was when TNN was outraged he blew off an interview after he ran out of fuel when he was leading at Loudon. That’s small potatoes compared to his later shit. But I was still on board throughout 1999 and into 2000.

I’m really dating myself here, but my AOL screen name was “RevTony20”, a monumentally dorky paean to inspire Stewart to go faster, and then when I joined my first NASCAR message board at speedworld.net late in 1999 to compete in a trivia contest there, I posted as Tony20 before changing my username to Sean in August. Stewart was already testing my patience after he right-hooked Mark Martin in that year’s all-star race, but I was basically done with him after he wrecked Jeff Gordon at Watkins Glen in the last race I went to (even though I never particularly liked Gordon). Unfortunately, none of the links from that link work but if you scroll through that, you will see that I invented a game there called the Pace Car Challenge. I was only 15 at the time. It was sort of a parody of head writer Matt McLaughlin (MATT)’s Out on a Limb game. He invented OOAL in 1998 where each player picked the polesitter and top three finishers in the race and each player scored a negative number of points based on the difference between your picks and where they actually finished/qualified. That summer, you could have done Pole: 24, 1: 24, 2: 6, 3: 99 and scored like a -5 every week.

Although I loved Matt’s writing and he was an important influence on me, I quite frankly thought OOAL was boring, so I launched PCC to win on Memorial Day weekend in 2000 (geez, a quarter century ago). It was originally just a single-week game where I asked people to predict various events in that year’s Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600 including picking the winners. I distinctly remember that I picked Greg Ray to win after he won the pole instead of Montoya and then he crashed and finished last, hahaha. In retrospect, I do think the CARTisans gave him too much shit when they compared him to Shigeaki Hattori or Tora Takagi or whoever. He was not that. If I had to compare him with any CART driver, it would be some fast but mid-pack and utterly crash-prone driver like Alex Tagliani. I do think Ray had talent although he was still a pretty ridiculous champion. He still beat Kenny Bräck for the title when his predecessor Stewart failed to do so… He won’t be making the list. Anyway, when I launched PCC, I decided I wanted to ask questions from all different racing series, not just NASCAR, I wanted to ask different questions every week to keep the players on their toes, and (here’s the parody part) the winner was whoever’s score was the farthest below zero. A couple weeks after I launched it, MATT mentioned me in one of his OOAL results columns with the comment “the pace car finished better than [whoever; one of my picks who didn’t do well]“. I was over the moon! I still have all my old questions in some Excel spreadsheet on a computer that hasn’t booted in years (I still have all my old hard drives but I haven’t done anything with them). I remember asking people to pick which driver would have the largest difference between their car number and the sum of their starting and finishing positions, what the theme song for the Bristol night race would be (for bonus points), “spell the #25’s driver correctly” (again for bonus points because I was getting annoyed by people writing things like “Nadue”), and I remember offering -1,000,000 points (basically an automatic win) to anyone who correctly picked both the highest finisher and their finishing position for the No Bull 5 race at Richmond and I remember that Monster Mile Man got it: Earnhardt and 2nd. Unlike OOAL (which was a week-by-week game), I offered a championship where I awarded the winner the same number of points as the number of entrants that week down to one point for whoever finished last (this was my way of attempting to ensure consistent competition, and it worked).

I gave up the game when I started 10th grade (I had only run it for like five months), but amazingly, both OOAL and PCC lasted another couple decades even long after MATT and I were gone from that family of sites. speedworld.net turned into SpeedFX then RacingOne before Pete Pistone bought out the previous site’s owner Derek and it gained some loose affiliation with NASCAR as RacingOne. Pete fired Matt McLaughlin as head writer because he was too critical of NASCAR, which prompted an exodus of many of the veteran posters to another site called RacingStalkers. Both OOAL and PCC eventually moved there after several other changes of management. I posted on RacingStalkers for a while until 2011 or so, but by then I left that board of mostly boomers and Gen-Xers to hang out in the racing-reference comments section with people who were genuinely my age or younger. RacingOne was eventually rebranded as MRN’s website and they dumped the forum, but both games continued on in a watered-down format (the later people who ran PCC mostly asked the same questions every week, which is what I originally was trying to avoid, and I think most of the players forgot that it actually stood for something.) RacingStalkers was still hanging in there until it finally shut down like two years ago, but I’m amazed that the game I invented lasted twenty years and longer than the original message board from whence it came. So Stewart brings back a lot of happy memories for me, but they’re mainly happy memories of that message board and the Internet of that era since those were the first people I ever socialized with outside of my parents or people I saw in school. But as for Stewart himself, haven’t had much good to say about him in years.