USA TODAY International Edition
STEWART WANTS LOW- KEY FAREWELL
Gordon- like exit doesn’t suit driver
Camera crews INDIANAPOLIS from the local TV affiliates were mingling by the elevators, occasionally glancing across the lobby and through two sets of glass doors separating them from Tony Stewart.
A three- time Sprint Cup champion and two- time Brickyard 400 winner, Stewart sat in the photographers’ room at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and stared back at them as he leaned deep into an office chair, corded phone pushed into the crook of his neck. Most of the Indiana native’s day would be spent filling interview requests and discussing what will be Stewart’s last NASCAR race here Sunday and his last season before retiring.
“Sure. Take it easy,” Stewart signed off, hanging up the phone, then turning wide- eyed to the two media reps care- taking his schedule, which included pacing several laps in a midget car on a new dirt track installed in Stewart’s honor near Turn 3 at IMS.
Stewart, 45 and in his 18th season at NASCAR’s highest level, has been determined to do this farewell his way.
He watched last year as fivetime Brickyard winner Jeff Gordon went through a highly celebrated and intensively intrusive goodbye season.
If there was one part of Gordon’s farewell tour Stewart hoped to replicate it was how the fourtime series champion used a victory to qualify for the Chase for the Sprint Cup and advance to the Homestead- Miami Speedway finale with a chance at one last title.
If there was one part of Gordon’s exit he hoped to eschew, it was the constant attention and pressure to succumb to ceremony as the number of races dwindled. For Stewart, there would be mini- mal fuss. Minimal pomp.
“I got to see firsthand the circus he had to go through last year,” Stewart told USA TODAY Sports.
Stewart lowered the veil for the media session at IMS on July 5 and was determined to cinch it back up tight for the march to his final Sprint Cup event in November at Homestead.
The Brickyard 400 weekend would be a sound test of his team’s preparedness and discipline to the plan.
“It’s flattering. It’s very flattering,” Stewart said of the attention he will receive at Indianapolis and elsewhere. “They don’t do that if they don’t like you, and it’s flattering to have people do that. I appreciate that, but I want to focus on racing.”
To ensure that, Stewart, business manager Eddie Jarvis and Stewart- Haas Racing executive vice president Brett Frood consulted with Gordon’s stepfather and vice president of Jeff Gordon Inc., John Bickford, to see, Stewart said, “what were things he liked and things they didn’t like, if you could do it again, what would you do different.”
“I just laid out our strategy and our success rate, where we saw the distractions coming from and how we anticipated and traded our favors with tracks and NASCAR and various people to offset those,” Bickford told USA TODAY Sports.
“Jeff’s whole thing was, ‘ I want to be competitive in my final year.’ Those were the goals, and the only way you were going to get there ( was) without distraction. Your distractions impact your performance.”
Gordon is also helping Stewart’s wish for a lower profile at Indianapolis in an unexpected way, as he will come out of retirement to replace Dale Earnhardt Jr., who’s recovering from concussion symptoms, in the No. 88 Chevrolet for two races, beginning this weekend.
IMS President Doug Boles said Stewart conceded to the dirttrack publicity day because it long preceded the race weekend. Boles said Stewart told him, “What I want to do is I want to win my last Brickyard 400.”
By the end of 2015, Gordon’s final weekend at Homestead felt like a coronation.
Stewart does not foresee such a spectacle for himself.
“I love Jeff. Jeff and I are better friends now than we have ever been, and when you go with your buddy and he breaks your back and you still like him as a friend, you’ve got a good friendship,” Stewart quipped, referring to the January off- roading accident that cost him the first eight races of the season.
Although Gordon threw a lavish party at The Villa, Casa Casuarina on South Beach that pushed into the predawn hours after last year’s final race of the season, Stewart — if he doesn’t have duties as a newly minted champion — expects to again be behind the wheel of a motor home plying Interstate 95 north, making miles before the sun rises.
“I’m going off- road riding on Monday,” Stewart said of the first day free of driving responsibility. “Most likely, I’m going to be in the motor home driving with the bus driver home, because he can’t drive straight through to get the motor home parked in Georgia the next day.”
Driving off into the sunrise. Different, and his way.