News this week of Tony Stewart’s move from the sportsman-level Top Alcohol Dragster category to the NHRA’s professional headliner Top Fuel class was not much of a jolt.
That his wife, Leah Pruett, who executed a riveting run and lost a winner-take-all showdown to Doug Kalitta by .064 of a second last month, chose to step from the cockpit to concentrate on starting a family took the drag-racing community by surprise Thursday.
“I think we’ll be fine. And I plan to return to the seat as soon as I can,” Pruett said. Her husband was not quite as bold.
He said, “My goal is to not suck. My goal is to not get fired by my wife and not kill myself driving this thing. So I think we’ll be fine. It is just going to be a matter of time. Every time we’ve jumped into a different type of race car in different form of motorsports, there’s always a learning curve. And this is no different.
“This [the 11,000-horsepower, nitro-burning dragster] has probably been one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to learn to drive,” Stewart said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m not smart or what, but I keep throwing big challenges in my racing career. And this was one that wasn’t planned.
“When Leah said it was her decision, the very first conversation we had about it, I spent the first 30 seconds in husband mode in the discussion and then morphed into car-owner mode, knowing the timing of this and how it could affect a season or two seasons. And by the end of a 10-minute conversation,” he said, “I realized if I didn’t shut up soon, I wasn’t going to have to worry about it. She would divorce me.”
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Pruett gave a “He’s incorrigible” wifely wag of her head and chuckled at his humor. But she was serious when she said, “He has a lot of reservations about . . . He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And he’s had some great testing laps, has learned some things in the fuel car that are not transactional with the alcohol car. And so he’s got this huge learning curve. Everyone has this huge learning curve. Sure, he does – everybody does. And I think he’s finally over the stage at some point when yeah, all eyes are going to be on him in the beginning for a little while. And then it’s just going to be, I feel like, status quo after that.”
She admitted that “when NHRA said [Thursday’s announcement at the PRI Show at Indianapolis] was ‘NHRA’s biggest announcement’…
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