Tony Stewart is one of the greatest race car drivers of all time. He has won three Cup Series championships in NASCAR and one in IndyCar. However, Smoke has not won everything there is to win. The 53-year-old has never celebrated a Daytona 500 victory as a driver. It’s quite surprising considering how good a racer he was back in the day.
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He has competed in The Great American Race on 17 occasions but has never managed to get to Victory Lane. He has won the summer Daytona race four times so it is not a track that he has had a problem racing on. Smoke has just been unlucky on a lot of occasions. His first participation in the 500 was in 1999 in which he started from the front row. However, he could only manage a P28 finish. Stewart came closest in 2004 when he started P5 and finished P2.
Two Hall Of Famers battling for the win.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart in the closing laps of the 2004 Daytona 500. #NASCAR #DAYTONA500 @DaleJr @TonyStewart @DAYTONA pic.twitter.com/avWMx3oVgO
— NASCAR Pics That Goes Hard (@HardNASCARPics) February 19, 2024
“I can tell you this—I have zero interest in going and run on a Daytona 500. I respect the history of that event. I respect the sport,” he had said. “As much as I love the Daytona 500—and I haven’t checked it off the list with a win—I’ve kind of just come to terms with how I’m okay with that now after watching the last five or six years of restrictor plate racing.”
He last raced in The Great American Race in 2015 but he retired after the 2016 season. However, that year did not get off to a good start for Smoke as he was recovering from a broken back and missed the first eight races of the season.
Stewart won the 500 a year after retiring from full-time racing
What he could not do as a racer, Stewart did as a team owner. The 2017 Daytona 500 was won by Kurt Busch driving the #41 Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing. It might not have tasted as good as a race victory but it certainly felt like a special moment for Smoke. Speaking to the media after the race, the 53-year-old expressed his joy at the achievement.
“If I knew I would retire and win the next race, I would have retired 17 years ago and got it that way. It’s a pretty cool deal. This is one that we’ve waited for for a long, long time,” he said.
The team used to be in its prime back then, but things have fallen massively for the team since then. Now after the end of the 2024 season, Stewart Haas Racing will leave NASCAR once and for all. It’ll be weird to not see the Stewart name in NASCAR after over two decades of having so.
