There are celebrities who show up to drag races, put on a helmet, and let someone else do the thinking. They’re good for a photo-op and a press release and not much else. Tony Stewart is not that kind of celebrity. What Stewart has done since committing to NHRA nitro competition – not just as a driver, but as a team owner building a program from the ground up – is something fundamentally different, and people inside the sport are starting to take notice.
Matt Hagan, a man who doesn’t throw compliments around carelessly, framed it as clearly as anyone could. Hagan would know better than most. He drives the Dodge//SRT Hellcat Funny Car for Tony Stewart Racing, Stewart’s own team. When your driver looks at the man who signs the checks and says that’s who this sport needs to attach itself to, it’s not flattery. It’s an honest assessment from someone who watches him work every day.
“I really think that if I was a fan on the outside looking in, it’s like, that’s the next John Force,” Hagan said. “That’s who NHRA needs to attach themselves to and figure out how long Tony wants to do this and really rally behind that.”
Stewart also owns the Top Fuel dragster that his wife, Leah Pruett, currently drives. He stepped into the car full-time last year while she sat out, then passed the seat back and took the opportunity to drive for Richard Freeman’s Elite Motorsports team this season. That means he’s now both a competitor on the track and a team owner running cars against himself. It’s a situation that has no real precedent in this sport, and speaks to how seriously Stewart has gone all-in on drag racing rather than treating it as a side project.
The comparison to Force isn’t casual. It’s the highest bar that exists in the sport: a man whose name alone has carried the promotional weight of an entire professional class for decades. And Hagan’s point is clear – Stewart brings that same star power. He arrives at NHRA national events with a fanbase built across NASCAR, IndyCar, sprint car racing, and a Hall of Fame career that touches virtually every corner of American motorsports. That crossover appeal doesn’t transfer automatically, but Stewart has made it transfer because he does the work.
Richard Freeman, who has spent years building championship teams and watching the business of drag racing up close, has seen what that name does in rooms where it previously couldn’t get a return call. He’s had those conversations with Stewart – late-night, off the record, honest assessments of what it means to be able to say his name to a Fortune 500 company and watch the room change.
The late Don Schumacher put it simply when the subject of Stewart’s involvement first came up in a conversation with Hagan: “Not everybody knows who Don Schumacher is, but they know who Tony Stewart is.”
But what strikes the people around him most isn’t the name recognition. It’s the consistency. Stewart treats each crew guy the same way he treats the CEO of a sponsor company. He shows up, digs in, and doesn’t look down on anyone in the building.
“He’s just a normal guy,” Freeman said. “He’s a racer. He’s like Matt, he’s like Erica [Enders], he’s like all the rest of them.”
Stewart doesn’t have a title that says ambassador or spokesman. He has something better – authenticity. And every time he describes what this sport actually feels like to someone who’s never experienced it, he does more recruiting for drag racing than any campaign NHRA has ever run.
Stewart himself articulated the responsibility that comes with his platform, and the thing he genuinely wants fans who have never seen a nitro car to understand. The first time he stood close to a Top Fuel car on the track, he felt sick just standing there.
“I literally felt my insides move,” Stewart said. “I’ve been in motorsports for 47 years. I’ve never been around anything that ever made my insides move and made me car sick – and I wasn’t moving.”
That story, told to new fans at the rope, told to NASCAR audiences, told anywhere people will listen, is exactly the kind of authentic, unfiltered recruitment tool that no marketing budget can manufacture. It’s real. It happened to him. And it happens to every first-time attendee who gets close enough to feel what this sport truly entails.
Stewart’s answer to what winning looks like a year from now was equally clear-eyed: get the Elite Motorsports Pro Stock program back to the front, keep building the Top Fuel program, and fight for a championship in both categories. But the larger mission is to continue proving that drag racing can grow, can attract new audiences, can sustain Fortune 500 partners. He’s racing. He’s building something bigger. And he’s doing both at the same time.
