Young driver remembered
Ward, killed in Stewart incident, showed promise
Saturday was race night, which meant the far left garage bay and driveway at Westward Painting Co. on Laura Street in Lyons Falls should have been bustling Sunday afternoon.
Instead, the sound of silence was deafening.
The garage bay was empty, the driveway deserted. The battered No. 13 sprint car of Kevin Ward Jr. was still in Canandaigua, though his black Dodge Ram pickup was parked off to the side.
“They would always be out here the day after a race,” said Lynn Hardy, who lives across Laura Street from the garage. “They would have the tires off and they’d be doing their maintenance, and Kevin would start the car and rev the engine.
“This is quiet. This is not right.”
Ward was killed Saturday night when he was struck by Tony Stewart’s car at Canandaigua Motorsports Park, where both were racing 360 sprint cars in the Empire Super Sprints. Chuck Miller, the race director and president for the ESS circuit, said it was the fifth or sixth time Stewart had raced on the circuit over the last four years. Ward had been spun by Stewart and approached the three-time Sprint Cup champion’s car under caution when he was hit.
Ward was remembered Sunday by his neighbors and sprint car series officials as a racer with prodigious talent and no acrimonious past with Stewart.
“There’s no history with these two drivers,” Miller said. “That’s the competitive nature of the game and the drivers around it.”
Miller said Ward won the ESS rookie of the year award as a 16year-old in 2010, finishing seventh in the standings. He had won four times since, and his family was involved with sponsoring awards for the ESS, which races at 18 tracks across the Northeast and in Montreal, and hosting indoor go-kart races.
“Kevin was a prolific winner in go-karts at all levels,” Miller said. “He showed a lot of promise and talent. ... On the track, you couldn’t tell him apart from a veteran. He had that kind of talent.”
Word of Ward’s death spread quickly.
“When I got up this morning, I had a text message that Kevin died,” said Justin Marmon, 21, who was two years ahead of Kev- in Ward Jr. at South Lewis High School in nearby Turin.
Sue Sampson saw the news online about 6 a.m. “I said, ‘ Oh, my God, this is the kid up the road.’ ”
In these tiny towns at the southern end of New York’s Adirondack Region, there are no strangers.
“Everybody feels awful bad,” said Don Gydesen of Lyons Falls. “Everybody around here knows Kevin.” They know his father, too. Kevin Sr. owns Westward Painting. He sponsored the truck series not long ago at Adirondack Speedway.
The story told by several townsfolk was that when the town of Lyons Falls needed the railings of the Black River bridge painted, Kevin Sr. did it. For free.
At the Ward home just off Kelpytown Road, family and friends gathered to mourn.
They requested privacy as car after car, truck after truck, with townsfolk stopped by to offer condolences.
The Wards issued a statement that read: “The family appreciates all the prayers and support and would like time to grieve at this point.”
Their 20-year-old son started out driving go-karts on a track in the backyard.
“You’re thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, he’s too young for this,’ ” said Hardy, Kevin’s aunt through a previous marriage to Randy Ward. “And then he grew up.
“This is horrible — just horrible.”
Bruce and Tammy Branagan of Port Leyden, N.Y., lived about a half-mile from Ward’s family. Kevin often would ride his fourwheeler or snowmobile on the roads and asked for the Branagans’ permission to ride on their property.
“He asked if he could go through on his four-wheeler,” Bruce Branagan said. “He always had to have the loudest one.”