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NASCAR’s Chase won’t feature Tony Stewart again – USA TODAY
RICHMOND, Va. — Tony Stewart will not be part of NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup playoff for the second straight year.
Despite getting a waiver to excuse his three-race absence in the wake of Kevin Ward Jr.’s death, Stewart failed to capitalize on two chances to win —at Atlanta Motor Speedway and Saturday night’s race at Richmond International Raceway — meaning he will miss the Chase for just the third time in his career.
And NASCAR’s championship spotlight won’t include one of its biggest stars.
Stewart won championships in 2002, 2005 and 2011. He has missed the Chase in 2006, 2013 and 2014.
Stewart ran in the top 20 all night but he was never really competitive. He cracked the top 10 on a couple of occasions before finishing 15th.
“I think this is going to be the longest night of my life,” Stewart radioed at the halfway point. “Whew!”
He was forced to make a second trip down pit lane after a lap 331 caution for a missing lug nut. He restarted 15th, one of the last two cars on the lead lap.
Stewart struck and killed Ward Jr.in a sprint car race at Canandaigua Motorsports Park on Aug. 9. The Ontario County (N.Y.) Sheriff’s Department continues to investigate the incident. Sheriff Philip Povero said Aug. 29 the investigation would take at least two more weeks.
Stewart had missed three consecutive races — at Watkins Glen International, Michigan International Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway — before returning to action at Atlanta last weekend.
His Stewart-Haas Racing team applied for — and was granted — a waiver that would have allowed him to still be Chase-eligible with a victory. But he crashed out early in the Atlanta race — slamming into the wall twice before coasting into the garage just past the halfway mark of the Oral-B USA 500. He finished 41st.
And he never had the car to win Richmond throughout the weekend.
Stewart is expected to keep competing throughout the final 10 weeks; he just won’t be one of the 16 drivers in NASCAR’s playoff.
In 2006, the year after winning his second title, Stewart missed the Chase but won three of the final 10 races.
Greg Zipadelli, the competition director at Stewart-Haas Racing since 2012, said there’s nothing comparable to the strife currently engulfing the three-time Cup champion.
“It’s just a different nature from things of the past,” said Zipadelli, who guided Stewart to two championships and 33 victories as his crew chief from 1999-2008 at Joe Gibbs Racing. “Not to make light of any of the other situations, but this is truly just a tragedy. You are talking about somebody who lost their life. You are talking about (sprint car racing) that (Stewart) enjoyed, just loved to do it.
“It was his golf game, his hunting and fishing, and it’s just a really bad situation. There’s a lot of things that he’s gone through that I went through earlier in my life that we could sit and talk about, but this is something that none of us can. And everybody deals with it differently. But it’s something he’ll have to deal with the rest of his life. It’s just a tough deal, that’s all I can say. There’s just a lot of stuff going on. There’s just a lot of unknown right now.”
It’s the second consecutive season with a disruption for the team, which lost Stewart to a broken leg — suffered in a sprint car race in Iowa — for the final 15 races last year.
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PHOTOS: Tony Stewart through the years
