NASCAR is having a rough month. Leaked texts from the big antitrust lawsuit have shown top execs talking about veteran owner Richard Childress like he’s the enemy, calling him a “stupid redneck” who should be “taken out back and flogged.” In other messages, they trashed the Superstar Racing Experience (SRX) that Tony Stewart helped start, labeling it “trash” and talking about putting a knife in it.

Fans are furious, teams are furious, and suddenly everyone is digging through old interviews looking for proof that this attitude isn’t new. That’s exactly how a year-old Tony Stewart clip is blowing up all over again. In the video, he’s calm, matter-of-fact, but the message is brutal. NASCAR stopped listening to the people who actually race the cars a long time ago.

Stewart remembers a meeting where he and almost twenty veteran drivers sat down with leadership to offer five specific fixes they all agreed would help the sport. They suggested some real changes, born from thousands of laps and decades in the seat.

But according to Stewart, one executive shot every idea down, claiming that the drivers were “180 degrees backwards” from what they felt could fix the sport.

Stewart’s problem? The executive had never turned a wrench or driven a race car in anger. Not once.

He didn’t yell. He just looked at the camera and said that if the sport keeps changing at the rate it was going, it wouldn’t even be recognizable from when he started. And here we are years later, watching leaked texts prove the disconnect he warned about is still alive and ugly.

Stewart has never been shy about speaking his mind. He’s said flat out that NASCAR cares more about filling its own pockets than making sure teams stay healthy and the racing stays exciting.

He’s called the charter system a joke that locks competition in a box. In fact, that very system was a reason he exited from SHR because of the way the charters were handled.

And now, free from the Cup Series and any fear of fines, he can say whatever he wants. That freedom makes every old clip feel brand new, like he saw this exact moment coming.

The timing couldn’t be better, or worse, depending on who you ask. While NASCAR fights in court and tries to explain why its leaders talk about legends like Richard Childress that way, Stewart’s quiet warning from years ago is playing on repeat. It’s not just nostalgia. It’s evidence that the gap between the boardroom and the garage has been widening for a long time.

Fans on X have had enough and are speaking against it.

Fans can’t bear the disrespect

“I will they ever admit that the CoT destroyed the sport? left and never went back after that, and now I’m not alone.”

That one hurts because so many feel the same. The Car of Tomorrow rolled out in 2007 for safety, but drivers hated how it drove, and fans hated how it looked. Tony Stewart himself once called it the biggest pile of crap he ever drove.

A lot of people point to that car as the moment the soul started leaking out of the racing, and seeing these new leaks just brings all that old anger rushing back.

“Pretty much how every company and the entire country is run. Suits show up with their degrees and think they know more than the people who have been doing the job longer than they have.”

Exactly what Stewart was getting at. A room full of champions with thousands of starts between them gets told they’re wrong by someone who’s never felt a car loose in turn four. It’s not just NASCAR, it’s everywhere, but when it’s the sport you love, it hits different.

“Most Corporations don’t survive the 3rd generation. The 1st earns it, the 2nd enjoys it, and the 3rd squanders it.”

Family teams are the heartbeat of NASCAR, and fans see the same pattern. The people who built it from moonshine runners are long gone, and now some worry the current bosses are spending the goodwill instead of protecting it.

“Saw Tony in the pits in NHRA this year. He was telling someone how glad he was to be out of NASCAR.”

That one stings, too. Stewart’s racing dragsters and dirt cars now, smiling in a different pit area, and apparently telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s happier away from the Cup Series. After everything he gave the sport, three championships, millions of fans, that relief says a lot.

“Mayfield has always been right. Did you see how they treated the late Tim Richmond? NASCAR even came out afterwards of the Richmond deal and said. Oh ya, Our bad.”

Some fans are connecting all the dots. Richmond in the eighties, Mayfield in the two thousands, drivers today are scared to speak up. Same pattern, different decade. When the Childress texts dropped, it felt like another chapter in a story plenty of fans already believed.

Stewart never asked for this moment, but the internet handed it to him anyway. An old interview, a few calm sentences, and suddenly it’s the soundtrack to NASCAR’s latest mess. He warned that putting people with no seat time in charge would steer the sport off course. Watching the current storm, a whole lot of fans are starting to think he called it exactly right.