CONCORD, North Carolina — A guy in a Home Depot t-shirt, a woman in an Eldora Speedway hoodie and a kid in a Dodge drag racing hat walk up to a bar.
No, that’s not the start of a joke. It’s an image of reality. It was at Charlotte’s zMax Dragway, site of the NHRA’s fifth event of the season, the 4-Wide Nationals, held earlier this month on a 1,000-foot straight-line show palace built in the shadow of the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
It was on that adjacent 1.5-mile oval that Tony Stewart won a NASCAR Cup Series race and the NASCAR All-Star Race, completed the second half of a pair of Indy 500/Coca-Cola 600 one-day “Double Duty” marathons, and won a pair of pole positions in an IndyCar. The NASCAR Hall of Famer’s Stewart-Haas Racing HQ is located one exit up the highway from zMax and he has even fielded wining cars on the four-tenths-mile clay oval dirt track that sits adjacent to the drag strip.
But now the one they call “Smoke” is smoking the tires on an 11,000-horsepower NHRA Top Fuel dragster. Sure, racing is racing and Stewart has excelled at every racing discipline America has to offer, a series of crossover moves matched only by the likes of A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti. But drag racing, the one area those legends never dared to wander for more than a one-off event, is another planet. Here, races last four seconds instead of 400 miles and left turns are very, very bad.
Walking through Nitro Alley with a man who has infamously crashed through his near-53 years with all the delicateness of a wounded crocodile, one witnesses a Tony Stewart rarely seen in the wild. He smiles. He signs autographs. He answers questions. He is downright … happy?
Always feels good to be back out amongst my people and get some nitro in my nose with the NHRA and zMax Dragway. No one on this planet is cooler than drag racers. And I’ve never seen Tony Stewart look this happy. Please turn your volume up for the video. pic.twitter.com/4lzGpynGdm
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) April 26, 2024
“Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?” Stewart joked as he snaked his way through the fans strolling…
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