When Tony Stewart left Indiana for North Carolina, his friends pulled him aside for a piece of advice: Don’t go changing down there. He laughed about it later, because by the time he came back, he was the same person who had left. The problem was, nobody else was.
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On The Couches That Made Us podcast, Tony Stewart talked about what fame actually does, not to the person inside it, but to everyone watching from the outside.
“I was still the same person. I still wanted to do the same things when we got home.”
Before the three Cup titles, before IndyCar, before any of it, Stewart was just a kid from Columbus, Indiana. He worked a drill press for five dollars an hour, split meals with his girlfriend, and slept in his car. Then, when he needed money for a USAC race in Phoenix, he borrowed it from his machine-shop boss, finished second, took home $3,500, and never went back to the drill press.
But fame has a way of rewriting the story for everyone watching. His friends back home started seeing someone on TV, and that person replaced the one they actually knew.
“My buddies were the ones who changed because I wasn’t the same person on TV. And now they are changing because of who I am. I’m not changing. I haven’t changed anything about who I am away from the racetrack.”
That gap, between who Tony Stewart was in person and who people expected him to be, became the source of something he is still working through today.
“That was kind of part of the downhill slide for me, not getting along with race fans at times. And
He does not dress it up. He knows he is never going to be Jimmie Johnson or John Force. He is not trying to be. But he also gets real about what it actually feels like to stand in the heat with forty people in a line, finally get to the last two, and watch ten more walk up. You try, you get frustrated. You still fall short sometimes. But at the end of the day, “I just try to be” while still trying “to be a better person at the track” – he says it plainly, without making excuses.
When Tony Stewart was still a broke twenty-something grinding through the USAC ranks in Indiana, the Martz family took him in. He lived with them in Rushville for nearly a year and a half. They fed him, backed him financially, and kept telling him the same thing over and over: do the right thing. Car owners Steve Crisman and Raleigh Hemphill gave him real rides when no established team had any reason to look twice at him.
He talks about sitting around bonfires at Crisman’s place out in the country, talking about race cars until there was nothing left to say. He says those were moments he did not have with his father, so he found them wherever he could. That is the version of himself he has always returned to.
Tony Stewart races Top Fuel dragsters in the NHRA now. He spent two seasons with his own team, Tony Stewart Racing, filling in for his wife, Leah Pruett, while she stepped away to have their son, Dominic. When she came back for 2026, he moved to Elite Motorsports instead of quitting. He joked that if he beats her on track, he gets kicked to the couch.
The open-pit culture of drag racing suits him more than most people expected. No motorhome to disappear into. Fans right there, inches away. It is closer to the bonfires in Rushville than anything NASCAR ever offered.
He is still the same person. That was always the whole point.