INDIANAPOLIS — The compelling thing about racing is that you never know what the next day brings. Some you win, some you lose and some get rained out.
I was talking a while back with Dave Darland, USAC champion and country-boy philosopher, about the ups and downs of it all. His face broke into a grin.
“If you race for a living,” said Darland, “sometimes you’ll eat steak and sometimes you’ll have to settle for bologna.”
There are several regional variations on that feast-or-famine theme. At Martinsville some 40 years ago, I heard a guy in bib overalls declare that racing gives you chickens one day and feathers the next. Different country boy, same country-boy outlook.
Every great racer knows both sides of that menu.
There was a Friday morning in July 1993 when a blue-collar Indiana hopeful named Tony Stewart pulled out of his driveway in a beat-up Ford Escort, the best transportation he could afford at the time. He had recently turned 22. His destination was Wisconsin and the Hales Corners Speedway, which that evening was hosting the Badger Midget Auto Racing Ass’n.
Stewart pumped into the Escort’s tank only as much gas as he’d need for the 325-mile run to Hales Corners. Like every short-track dreamer, Stewart would later recall, he “always counted on earning enough at the track to get back home.” And like every short-track dreamer, he sometimes overreached with his optimism. Money was tight only on days that ended in “y.”
For richer or poorer, Stewart was happy to be going to Hales Corners at all. He’d been running a busy midget schedule for Rollie Helmling, the gentlemanly team owner best known for helping usher Jeff Gordon toward bigger things. Already in this summer of ’93, Stewart had shown flashes of Gordon-like promise.
One came at the Terre Haute Action Track, where he fought off Page Jones to win a feature Helmling still calls “one of the greatest midget races I’ve ever seen.”
But on the weekend in question, Helmling was skipping the Friday-night show at Hales Corners to focus on a Sunday USAC special at The Milwaukee Mile.
Meanwhile, Jones, arguably the hottest young driver of the era, had a stock car commitment and would also miss Hales Corners. That left an empty seat in Page’s regular midget ride, owned and wrenched by Illinois siblings Rusty and Keith Kunz. Stewart screwed up his courage and dialed their shop.
What Stewart didn’t know was that the brothers Kunz were feeling frustrated. Searching for a temporary fill-in for Jones, they’d already contacted a number of top-tier midget drivers, none of whom were available.
Keith answered the phone, then hollered to his brother across the garage. “Hey, remember that Tony Stewart kid from Terre Haute? He wants to go to Hales Corners and run that race.”
Rusty said, “Why not? We can’t get anybody else.”
All of which is what led to Stewart’s Escort chugging up I-65. Between what he had left after gas money and what his girlfriend carried in her purse, he figured he had enough to cover two pit passes, plus a bit extra. Come lunchtime, he handed that surplus to the drive-thru attendant at a McDonald’s. Back on the highway, he and his girl shared one cheeseburger, one small order of fries and one child-sized Coke.
But upon arriving at Hales Corners, Stewart discovered that his miserly ways at the gas pump and the Golden Arches were not enough: the pit fee was higher than he’d anticipated. He had only enough dough for his own pass.
Luckily, standing nearby was writer and midget enthusiast Crocky Wright. If anyone truly “discovered” Tony Stewart, it had been Crocky, who’d seen him in TQs and bragged him up to everyone he knew.
Crocky rode into town with Stewart’s girlfriend, who found an ATM and withdrew what Tony called “the last few dollars out of her checking account” so she could buy a pit pass of her own.
Good story so far. What made it a great story, a tell-it-forever story, was another Stewart miscalculation. He had assumed that the Hales Corners race was a standard Badger 30-lapper, paying $1,000 or $1,500 to the victor. Instead, it was a 100-lapper, with $7,000 on the nose, and he won it.
The payoff was in cash, mostly small bills and Stewart’s deal was for 50 percent.
“Tony’s eyes,” Rusty Kunz said, “were bigger than silver dollars.”
That $3,500 was the most money Stewart had ever held in his hands. Before leaving the track, he tucked a hundred bucks into the pocket of his jeans, stuffed the rest into the first briefcase he’d ever owned and “scared to death” that he’d get robbed, locked the briefcase in the Escort’s trunk.
He put the hundred to commendable use, picking up the tab when the group with him — a few friends, plus a mechanic or two — stopped for a midnight dinner. It was fast food, of course. Nothing else was open.
Chicken one day, feathers the next. Maybe steak, maybe bologna. And every now and then, when it all goes just right, you can tell the late-night cashier at the burger joint that, yes, you’d like the large order of fries and the big-boy drink.
This story appeared in the Jan. 4 edition of the SPEED SPORT Insider.
