In starting to look toward the future, Stewart pointed out NASCAR’s revised schedule for the month of May — released Thursday afternoon — is a lot easier to navigate than what potential revisions for his All Star sprint cars will be.
After all, Stewart noted, there’s only going to be so much space for everyone to book races on the calendar.
“And that’s the problem, isn’t it?” Stewart said. “You have bigger marquee races, events like the Kings Royal, the Knoxville Nationals, the Gold Cup (Race of Champions) at Chico and the National Open at Williams Grove … and most of the time it’s those marquee events like that that are the keys to accommodating facilities.
“Now with whatever’s going to happen, how do we accommodate a schedule change and this and that? That’s the big key,” he added. “All these race tracks across the country and short tracks across the country have their marquee events that are their money makers for the year. And those money makers are also what helps them sustain their local shows, the ones where they may not make money or the days that they get rained out and they’ve spent money on advertising and marketing. So it’s going to be a really hard challenge and it’s going to take a big effort from everyone involved with all of these series to figure out how we accommodate them, and knowing that there’s a possibility that we might have to shift dates around to help the industry as a whole. That’s going to be the biggest challenge.
“The hard part is it’s even extremely hard to plan for it right now because we just don’t know when that (racing) time frame is going to be to even understand how much or how little shuffling we’re going to have to do. But we’ll work with each other to try to accommodate dates and make it all work out.”
The long and short of things is that Stewart doesn’t know exactly what the future holds outside of the seven NASCAR national series races announced on Thursday afternoon.
The look of the resumption of the All Star Circuit of Champions schedule is still unclear for now, but the series’ next scheduled race is at Michigan’s I-96 Speedway on May 15, giving his crew a couple of weeks to plan if racing is able to resume.
But what Stewart does know is that it will take a collective effort from track and series promoters, as well as others within the racing industry, in order for anything to be successful as the sport tries to climb back onto solid ground from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The secret to success here is just cooperation with everybody to try to figure out what we have to do to take care of everybody in this time,” he noted. “If we can do that, this will all work out in a way that’s as beneficial as possible for everyone involved.”