It’s so good to have Smoke back in NASCAR.
It’s been 10 years since Tony Stewart has been behind the wheel in a NASCAR race, but this weekend he’ll be competing in the Craftsman Truck Series race at Daytona in his first NASCAR event since his retirement following the 2016 season.
After he hung up the helmet, Tony was still a part of the sport as part owner of Stewart-Haas Racing, but his race team closed its doors in 2024 and since then Stewart has been mainly focused on his NHRA drag racing career, as well as his wife and becoming a father for the first time.
He was also a founder of SRX, the Superstar Racing Experience, which was a short track racing series that hosted races from 2021-2023, and often attracted some of the top names in NASCAR to compete during the mid-week races.
(That part’s going to be important in just a minute).
It became pretty clear over his last couple of years as a team owner that Stewart was increasingly unhappy with NASCAR and some of the decisions that were being made by leadership. And despite the fact that he’s returning to the sport, it seems like there are still some hard feelings from Smoke…
If you remember back to last year, several text messages were released over the course of the antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR filed by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports that took aim specifically at SRX. The sport’s leadership at the time was clearly threatened by the series, despite the fact that SRX only ran six races every season and held their races at short tracks that NASCAR didn’t visit on their schedule.
In one series of text messages, NASCAR President Steve O’Donnell and former Chairman Steve Phelps were particularly upset that 23XI team owner, and Joe Gibbs Racing driver, Denny Hamlin was going to be competing in SRX, with Phelps writing that NASCAR needed to “put a knife in this trash series.” And in another particularly pointed message, O’Donnell complained that the NASCAR drivers and owners (including Stewart) competing in SRX didn’t care about “what got them their careers.”
During the trial, NASCAR executives even testified that they were concerned about fans getting confused when they saw NASCAR champion Chase Elliott running an SRX car with the same number and sponsor as his Cup Series car, despite the fact that the SRX cars look nothing like the cars raced in NASCAR.
Well Tony Stewart clearly still isn’t over the comments made by O’Donnell, or the text messages that were released during the lawsuit. Because today, he was asked whether he had spoken to the NASCAR president yet at Daytona, and in typical Smoke fashion, he didn’t hold back:
“I have not had that pleasure yet. Not at all. … I’m going to do my deal. If I run into Steve O’Donnell, he’ll have to deal with that part. But I’m gonna go do me and I don’t really care what he does this week.”
I hope that if they run into each other in the garage this weekend, there’s a camera close by.
Gotta love Tony Stewart. And luckily for NASCAR fans, he’s still his usual unfiltered self.
