After first-round losses to Justin Ashley at Gainesville, Fla., and Steve Torrence at Pomona, Calif., Tony Stewart earned his first NHRA Top Fuel elimination round-wins Sunday morning at the Arizona Nationals at Firebird Motorsports Park.
Stewart, racing in his first season in the NHRA Mission Foods Drag Racing Series for the first season and starting out of the No. 15 spot on the 16-car grid, defeated No. 2 qualifier Brittany Force. Afterward, he acknowledged that it’s a rather difficult kind of race car to master.
However, he said, “One of the hardest things is my wife [Leah Pruett] drove this car last year, and she’s 55 pounds lighter than I am. So [crew chiefs] Neil [Strausbaugh] and Mike [Domagala] and Ryan [car chief McGilvry] and all these guys in this Direct Connection Dodge team with this Top Fuel car, they’re having to figure out how to get my fat butt going, getting it started.”
Strausbaugh laughed and said, “He’s been driving his ass off. Everybody knows he can do it. I’ve been working my butt off to get it to go down the track.”
Stewart said, “So, we’re struggling, but this is something the teams needed. We haven’t made it through the first round out in the first two events.”
Two of his three runs have come against series champions Torrence and Force, who have a combined six titles, and Ashley is a perennial contender who is renowned ace with reaction times on the launch.
“So if you’re going to be the best, you got to beat the best,” Stewart said.
Stewart went on to beat Billy Torrence in the event quarterfinals before losing to Justin Ashley in the semifinals. Ashley went on to lose to Shawn Langdon in the event final on Sunday.
Susan Wade has lived in the Seattle area for 40 years, but motorsports is in the Indianapolis native’s DNA. She has emerged as one of the leading drag-racing writers with nearly 30 seasons at the racetrack, focusing on the human-interest angle. She was the first non-NASCAR recipient of the prestigious Russ Catlin Award and has covered the sport for the Chicago Tribune, Newark Star-Ledger, and Seattle Times. She has contributed to Autoweek as a freelance writer since 2016.
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