Stewart plans last ride in 2016

[September 29, 2015]  By Jonathan Ingram, The Sports Xchange
 
 Tony Stewart, the driver currently most reminiscent of legendary tough guys like A.J. Foyt or Dale Earnhardt Sr., has made one of motor racing's toughest decisions. He'll retire from driving in the Sprint Cup at the end of next season.

The reasons are self-evident. An Indy Racing League champion and three-time NASCAR champ, Stewart has not been the same swaggering driver since suffering a compound fracture of his leg in a sprint car accident two years ago or since his car struck and killed Kevin Ward Jr. in a sprint car race last year.

This Sprint Cup season, Stewart has not been competitive for the entire year in cars where lower aerodynamic downforce was introduced by new NASCAR rules. Next year, there will be even less downforce in the majority of races than there was this year.

Even so, the 44-year-old Stewart will try to retire on his own terms - running one more season to demonstrate that like all great drivers he can adapt to changing circumstances. He'll try to show that if Kyle Busch can come back from serious leg injuries, he can too, even if on a longer timeline. And he'll continue to try to rise above the tragic death of Ward Jr., whose family has filed a wrongful death suit against him.

Stewart's decision will become official Wednesday in a media conference hosted by him and Stewart-Haas Racing co-owner Gene Haas. Stewart plans to involve the driver replacing him.

Clint Bowyer will succeed Stewart behind the wheel at SHR in 2017, which is another reason behind the timing of Stewart's decision. He's got a driver to follow him who is certainly as tough, if not quite as talented, behind the wheel.

While providing a stable transition for his team and sponsors, Stewart has a role model in Jeff Gordon, who will retire at the end of this season. Gordon's final ride has been an opportunity for the four-time champion to recognize his fans and industry professionals who have worked with him. Apparently Stewart sees himself making a similar exit. Except that Stewart will move to looking after his team and its sponsors instead of graduating to the broadcast booth.

This will be a far cry from the exit of Foyt, one of Stewart's boyhood heroes. Foyt, a four-time Indy 500 winner, announced his retirement from driving after a poor qualifying performance at Indy. Alas, such off-the-cuff decisions do not fare well when it comes to the modern era's demands from sponsors and the need by team owners to keep cash flows flowing.

The news broke on a difficult day for Stewart-Haas racing. Defending Sprint Cup champion Kevin Harvick and his team directed by crew chief Rodney Childers apparently threw away a much needed victory at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway on Sunday by running out of fuel while leading within two laps of the checked flag.

The result means Harvick must win at Dover International Speedway next week to advance out of the Challenger round of this year's Chase.

There wasn't much doubt Harvick had the fastest car in New Hampshire. His Chevy led six times for 216 of the 300 laps. Crew chief Childers said he didn't have much doubt that Harvick could stretch his fuel to the finish and to the limit of an 88-lap fuel window on the one-mile oval. But something went very wrong, leaving Childers scratching his head and Harvick refusing to discuss his day with the media.

That left Childers to explain. "The good thing about these days is you have EFI (Electronic Fuel Injection) data to go back and look at," Childers tweeted following the race. "By the data, (Harvick) saved double what we needed to make it to the end. It should have been a non-issue. Which is why we weren't worried. It looked like for some reason it must have not got full on our last stop of the race or the fuel cell bladder is coming apart. All in all my engineers do a great job for me and hardly ever make any mistakes. They work their butts off to make sure this doesn't happen. If anything showed we were taking a chance we would have pitted. On to Dover. It's not over."

Childers' tweet strikes one more like an excuse than a good explanation of what really happened to the defending champs. There were other odd things beyond the gas man not knowing if he got the tank full or the engineers miscalculating over the course of 88 laps without being able to catch an error.

Harvick called in over the radio to question just how many laps he needed to save more than halfway through his stint - which sounded more like confusion than a strategy. Childers himself called his driver into the pits after the ninth caution , which would have given Harvick plenty of cushion on fuel. Alas, Childers made the radio call too late and Harvick motored past the pit entrance.

And when was the last time anybody heard of a fuel cell bladder going bad?

A Stewart-Haas victory would have helped Stewart's retirement announcement go a bit smoother. It's too bad external influences have hastened the mercurial driver's decision as much as the length of his career.

Can he be competitive again and make the Chase as Gordon has done? It will be interesting to see how the final season turns out for the guy known as Smoke.

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