I’ll do anything for the Camping World SRX championship, but I won’t do that.
Or maybe, trailing Ryan Newman by 39 points, Tony Stewart will do literally whatever it takes to overtake one of his best friends in motorsports by the end of the Thursday Night Thunder finale on ESPN.
“We’ve been teammates for a long time, and we’ve been friends for years,” Stewart said during a Wednesday afternoon teleconference. “This is what you would consider an ideal situation, I think for both of us, to be racing each other for a championship.
“He’s got a pretty good point lead, but anything can happen. If all of a sudden he gets spun around on the pace lap, you’ll probably know it was me because that may be the best shot I’ve got at catching him before they drop the green.”
The three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, 1996 Indy Racing League champion and NASCAR Hall of Famer was joking … right?
“I think it’s fun for us to have this opportunity and you want it to be about who does the best job over six weeks,” Stewart.
Okay, good, but if he’s not, Newman has a solution prepared just in case.
“Well, you know, after he spins me out in the heat races, I can always take that 15 minute break and lock him into an outhouse and figure out some other way to handle the situation just due to my body size, you know,” Newman said with a laugh.
We’re all joking here … right?
“Yeah, I really just look forward to the opportunity to go there and race,” Newman said. “We had a pretty good two or three lap battle at Eldora trading slide jobs back and forth. And I look forward to that opportunity again. We know we race hard together. We typically always do our best to race clean together, even though rubbing is racing.
“But at the same time, we want to be there to put on a show for the fans.”
Stewart and Newman came up the USAC ranks together, reached the NASCAR Cup Series at virtually the same time and then were Cup Series teammates in earliest days of Stewart-Haas Racing.
“It’s really cool for us to be in the situation, racing for a championship and knowing one of the two of us are going to bring this home,” Stewart said.
What’s next for Camping World SRX?
Thursday night marks the end of the third season for Camping World SRX.
The first two seasons aired live on Saturday nights on CBS Prime Time with this season moving to Thursday nights on ESPN. The change to mid-week allowed for greater participation from active NASCAR and IndyCar stars, who would otherwise be occupied with their day jobs over weekends during the summer.
The first three seasons has featured 12 car races, but Stewart does hope to expand to a 20-24 car roster and up to a 10-week season.
Related: Fuel your passion for short track racing. Race over to ShortTrackScene.com.
But the most interesting revelation made by Stewart during the Wednesday press conference was the potential for a November through January stint, right in the middle of the North American motorsports off-season, that could include international and southern hemisphere races.
“We have a little bit of interest from overseas to bring the SRX series over there,” said Stewart, a co-owner of the series. “And I think doing a 10- or 12-race schedule in the U.S., and then having time to rerack, get everything ready, make sure that we have plenty of cars, parts, everything that we would need to go on an overseas trip like that and repeat the same thing with eight or 10 races, that would be an ultimate deal for me.
“In the winter, when everybody’s got downtime, we could go somewhere nice and warm and have a lot of fun doing the same show that we do here in the U.S.”
Lucas Oil Entry List
06 Helio Castroneves
07 Clint Bowyer
1 Marco Andretti
5 Hailie Deegan
6 Brad Keselowski
14 Tony Stewart
18 Bobby Labonte
36 Kenny Wallace
39 Ryan Newman
49 Jonathan Davenport
52 Ken Schrader
99 Ernie Francis Jr
SRX Standings (5/6)
1. Ryan Newman 183pts
2. Tony Stewart 144pts (-39pts)
3. Marco Andretti 136pts (-47pts)
4. Brad Keselowski 133pts (-50pts)
5. Bobby Labonte 129pts (-54pts)
6. Hailie Deegan 124pts (-59pts)
7. Ken Schrader 117pts (-66pts)