Clean-shaven Tony Stewart looks like he’s barely aged since he made his Nascar Cup Series debut in 1999. But he’s much different than he was 25 years ago.
Stewart, 53, and his wife Leah Pruett are expecting their first child in November. It’s a big change for Stewart, and it coincides with a plethora of shifts in his professional career.
“Absolutely not,” Stewart joked about being ready to become a father. “With everything we’ve done in motor sports, I can walk up to a racecar I’ve never driven and I can look at it and understand the majority of it before I ever make a lap in it. [Having a child] is a side that I have zero setup sheets and zero knowledge about. My wife laughs at me because I have a ‘Daddy App’ that gives me hints and tips every day.”
At the end of the 2024 season, Stewart’s tenure as a Nascar Cup Series team owner will come to an end. In late May, he and Gene Haas announced the closure of Stewart-Haas Racing, which they formed together ahead of the 2009 season. The team has a pair of championships and 69 Cup wins since it was formed, along with 22 Xfinity Series victories. Stewart won the Cup title in 2011 with the team, the third of his legendary career. Kevin Harvick scored his only Cup championship with SHR three years later – his first season piloting the No. 4 car.
When the season finale arrives at Phoenix Raceway, it will have a similar feeling to Stewart’s last race as a Nascar driver in 2016 at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
“I think I’m going to be a lot more emotional about it than I think I’ll be,” Stewart said. “I took a lot of pride with what we’ve built at SHR. It is going to be sad. But like anything else, there’s changes that happen in life. I’ve been with Nascar for 28 years now. It’s going to be a very big change to not be a part of it from a driver or owner side of it at the end of the season.”
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