Tony Stewart, an NHRA winner, returns to Concord for 4-Wide Nationals
When Tony Stewart was a NASCAR owner, his Cup Series drivers once asked him to compare oval racing to NHRA.
“You know how we make split-second decisions driving a Cup car?” Stewart recalls saying in a Stewart-Haas Racing meeting last year. “Take that split-second decision, and make a split-second decision off that. That’s what we have to do drag racing, because it’s over in three-and-a-half seconds.”
The NHRA’s annual Four-Wide Nationals returns to zMAX Dragway in Concord, with qualifying sessions Friday and Saturday leading up to Sunday’s main event.
Stewart, 53, earned his first career Top Fuel victory last Sunday at Las Vegas. The four-time Cup Series champion as a driver and owner is a winner in nearly every form of motorsports, including NASCAR, IndyCar, NHRA, USAC and World of Outlaws.
He’s says there’s nothing like the dragstrip.
“Every ticket’s a pit pass, and all these parents get to bring their kids right to the cars to see them firsthand,” Stewart said. “Something that Leah (Pruett) told me that I thought was really neat when we started going: ‘Watch these little girls when they come up to the ropes and watch me work on the car.’ Their eyes are really big, like wow, she’s working on her own race car.
“Leah goes and tells them: ‘If I can do this, you could do this. And that, aside from just driving the car, is what the whole atmosphere is all about.”
Drag racing isn’t for every NASCAR star
Kyle Larson came out to zMAX Dragway and watched Stewart run in a Top Fuel car the day after an NHRA event.
As Stewart got ready to make his 10th and final run, Larson stood right up front where the starter flips the light switch alongside Pruett, Stewart’s wife.
Stewart ran at least 320 mph — the fastest he’d been at that point — and Pruett got it all on video. Stewart remembers Larson, the 2021 Cup Series champion, just smiling from ear to ear.
“Leah walks up to (Larson), goes, ‘You want to try it next?’” Stewart said with a laugh. “And he goes: ‘Hell no.’ And that’s a kid who’s fearless, I mean, he’ll drive anything.”
‘An appreciation for how crazy it was’
The U.S. Nationals, held near where he’s from in Indianapolis, was Stewart’s first NHRA race.
Tony Schumacher was being sponsored by the U.S. Army, which was also on Ryan Newman’s NASCAR Cup Series car. Stewart was there with Newman and stayed off to the side, not wanting to get in anyone’s way. Motors were being torn apart and reassembled in between runs, just showing a particularly fast-paced environment all the way around.
Once Stewart started dating Pruett roughly five years ago, she was attending his Cup Series races as NHRA had yet to resume amid the pandemic. So, Stewart returned the favor and showed up at her races once drag racing restarted later in 2020.
Pruett was driving alongside Schumacher — for his father, who owned Don Schumacher Racing — and an email indicated that nobody would be allowed inside the pits unless they were working on the race cars.
Except Don Schumacher, whom Stewart had met when they signed the U.S. Army deal in 2009, left a note on the bottom of the email. The legendary drag racer and owner said that Stewart, individually, would be permitted in the pits because he was “an industry professional.”
“The more I was around it, the more I really got an appreciation for how crazy it was and how insane all of it was, because you’re taking a car that has over 11,000 horsepower from a standing start,” Stewart said. “In our run, it doesn’t run the full quarter mile. In Top Fuel and Funny Car, the speeds were getting so high that they had to shorten the length of the track to shorten the speeds. And the other reason was because then once you get to the finish line and you throw the parachutes, they were running so fast that they were starting to run out of length of shutdown area to safely get the cars stopped.
“You’re literally taking a car that has over 11,000 horsepower at a standing start at the starting line, and it’s only going 1,000 feet versus 1,320 feet. And that car is going there in 3.7 seconds — sometimes 3.6 on a good run — and it’s running over 330 mph when it gets there. I mean, there isn’t another form of motorsports on the planet that does what these cars do.”
‘Come by and tell me what you thought’
Stewart met a lot of NASCAR fans at the drag strip last year, and their sentiments shared a common theme.
While the roar of the engines and smell of burning rubber are very familiar to fans of stock car racing, there’s a distinct allure about NHRA events.
There hasn’t been anyone Stewart has introduced to drag racing who said they didn’t like it. The most common response, overwhelmingly, is: “I had no idea.”
“If you’ve never been to a drag race, and if you’ve got a chance to come for qualifying on Friday, or just qualifying on Saturday, or the race Sunday, you don’t have to come for the whole weekend — just come for a day,” Stewart said. “Come for the first time. Just come see what it’s about. And if you get a chance, come by and tell me what you thought about it. Because I love hearing fans’ reactions who come to an NHRA race for the first time.”
This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 6:30 AM with the headline "Tony Stewart, an NHRA winner, returns to Concord for 4-Wide Nationals."
