Category: MotorSports

Tony Stewart and Joe Gibbs swap ridiculous stories from when they raced together

Like the times Joe Gibbs would try to stop Tony Stewart from breaking TVs after a bad race…

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Tony Stewart and Joe Gibbs go way back.

Stewart started his NASCAR Cup Series career racing for the Pro Football Hall of Famer in 1999 and continued competing for Joe Gibbs Racing through the 2008 season, winning two of his three career championships in the No. 20 car.

After 10 seasons working together with a relationship that has lasted much longer, the 2020 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductees have some incredible stories about each other.

As two NASCAR team owners with championship-contending drivers, they shared the stage Friday at Homestead-Miami Speedway ahead of Sunday’s Cup Series title race when Gibbs drivers Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. and Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick will race to win it all.

They also shared some of those stories about their days working together.

When Tony Stewart would take his anger out on the TVs…

During Friday’s press conference, Gibbs, who’s a few days away from 79th birthday, was asked about scolding his drivers, particularly Hamlin, who crashed his car during practice for the 2019 Daytona 500.

Hamlin recalled Thursday that the former Washington Redskins coach was “furious” and told Hamlin he was paying for the wrecked car. Luckily, Hamlin ended up winning the Daytona 500, so Gibbs eventually forgave him.

As Gibbs explained how he remembers that moment, Stewart chimed in at one point (around the 11-minute mark):

Gibbs: I don’t think I’ve ever penalized anybody for anything, but I threaten them every now and then.

Stewart: That’s not true.

Gibbs: On second thought, there is a driver I’ve worked with where we —

Stewart: I had to pay for two TVs in the lounge of the trailer that I broke.

Gibbs: I used to try and get to the hauler as fast as I could if he had a bad night because he was going to tear up the inside of the hauler.

Stewart: I feel like I got pretty good odds out of it because I think I broke five TVs before he finally said, “If you break another one, this one’s coming out of your paycheck.”

Gibbs: Hey, listen. I got him at Richmond one time. I beat him in there real quick. And you were ticked off. And he’s in there all flustered and everything, and he goes like — they usually turn to me after tearing stuff up — he goes, “I oughta go out there and kick his ass [the driver he was mad at].” And I went like this, I started to go, “OK, I think you should!” Hoping somebody will put a lump on you.

Stewart: See, as a good owner you should have thought of that first, and I would have saved the trailer.

“How it all started,” according to Tony Stewart

Before making his NASCAR Cup Series debut, Stewart was splitting his time between the second-tier XFINITY Series (then the Busch Grand National Series) and IndyCar. He said (at the 29:30 mark) after he was injured in an IndyCar race, he was living with his mom and stepdad for a month.

Stewart: My buddies had been calling all day, and it was AJ Foyt and then it was Mario Andretti and then it was Steve Kinser and this and that. None of them were. It was all my buddies saying who they were. So my mom answers the phone, it’s 10 o’clock at night, and my mom goes, “It’s Joe Gibbs.” I’m like, “Oh, great. Sure, here we go. Which one of these [expletive] is it now?” So they hand the phone over to me, and I’m like, “Hey, Joe, how the hell are you?” He goes, “Tony?” And I’m like, “Oh, my god, it really is Joe Gibbs.”

So that’s the way our whole relationship, literally from the first phone call on — because I obviously had to explain to him why I was being an idiot, other than I was heavily medicated. Had to explain to him why I was being the way I was. But that’s the way we’ve always been with each other. We’ve always had fun with each other. But I think as much as we’ve had fun, we’ve always had a high level of respect for each other as well.

Joe Gibbs knew who to call if he couldn’t find Tony Stewart

This one just speaks for itself (around the 30:35 mark).

Gibbs: I’ve got to tell you, I was chasing him all over the place trying to get him signed and trying to get things worked out. I’ve got to tell this. I don’t think you care [about] me telling it.

Stewart: Do you really have to tell this?

Gibbs: So I couldn’t find him lots of times, I would call the girlfriend. I would call the girlfriend, OK, and she would tell me where he was and everything. So about the third time I called the girlfriend, she goes, “That no-good rotten — don’t you ever call this house again.” I went, well, that was done.

Stewart: We were ready to hold auditions again. It was time. What can I say? All right, we need to talk about something now, oh, boy.

Gibbs: We need to get back to racing.

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Kyle Busch says retiring with 1 NASCAR title would ‘suck’ but 5 is ‘still attainable’

He has a chance to win his second NASCAR title this weekend.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Kyle Busch doesn’t relive his “what-if” moments and missed opportunities. But he said he’s not where he hoped he’d be after 15 full-time NASCAR Cup Series seasons.

The 34-year-old No. 18 Toyota driver is the 2015 NASCAR champion, he’s tied for ninth on the all-time Cup wins list with 55 and, earlier this season, he earned his 200th checkered flag across NASCAR’s three national series. He’s the most polarizing driver on the track, but his skill is undeniable.

But Busch will never be satisfied — at least, not until his championship total, at a minimum, triples.

“I’m behind for sure — definitely behind and in wins and championships,” Busch said Thursday ahead of the 2019 championship race Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

“Why? The list goes on. It’s a pretty long one, so how many can you get now is about where it’s at. If I end with one, that’s gonna suck. If I can only get two, ehh, whatever. But three, four, five — I think five’s still achievable. But when you get to this final race in this moment, this championship format the way that it is, and five years in a row and you only come away with one, that gets pretty defeating.”

Donald Page/Getty Images

Busch isn’t quite there yet, but he clearly holds himself to an exceptionally high standard.

He’s one of four remaining 2019 championship contenders, along with teammates Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr., plus Kevin Harvick. This is the fifth straight year Busch has advanced to the Championship 4 race under the current playoff format, which was implemented in 2014. But he hasn’t won it all since his first title.

To be fair, Jimmie Johnson is the only active driver with more than one championship, and he won his record-tying seventh in 2016. Unprecedentedly, Johnson also won five consecutively, which Busch said is “certainly hard for the rest of us to beat.”

And despite already achieving what is likely enough to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, Busch isn’t impressed. When asked if he ever gives himself credit for winning as regularly as he does, he said, “No, not really.”

Since his 2015 championship, Busch’s best finish in the standings was second to Truex in 2017. He was fourth in 2018 behind champion Joey Logano, Truex and Harvick and third in 2016 after Johnson and Logano.

Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

“Just there’s been too many missed opportunities,” he said, specifically citing 2016.

“There’s a lot of stuff out there that coulda, shoulda, woulda, and it just didn’t happen for whatever reason. And we just got to figure out how to leave all that behind this weekend though and go out there and succeed.”

The 2019 regular-season champ, Busch has four wins so far this season, but he hasn’t been to Victory Lane since June. Between his own skill, the brilliance of crew chief Adam Stevens and the fastest pit crew on the track, he’s still been able to dominate thanks to in-race points earned.

Through 35 races in 2019, he’s led a series-high 1,462 laps (14.64 percent), he has 16 top-5 finishes (45.71 percent) and he didn’t finish just two races.

He said he only briefly enjoys his successes because he’s just so aware of how much more he wants to attain.

“Trust me,” Busch said, “there ain’t gonna be anybody happier than me if we cross the finish line first on Sunday — for at least the first 10 minutes.”

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How Kyle Busch won around $1,000 off his fellow NASCAR drivers

Kyle Busch won an easy bet against his fellow NASCAR championship contenders — with a little trickery.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Kyle Busch already beat his fellow NASCAR championship contenders this week and even made some money off of them.

In New York on Tuesday promoting Sunday’s season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Busch, Denny Hamlin, Martin Truex Jr. and Kevin Harvick were stuck in “heavy traffic” on their way back to their hotel. They were about five miles away but barely moving, so Busch decided to run it.

The No. 18 Toyota driver made a bet that he could arrive at the hotel on foot faster than they could driving. So Busch mapped it out, he changed his shoes and he, along with a cameraman — who works for Pro Sports Management, the company that represents Hamlin — got out of the van and took off running.

Hamlin said Thursday at NASCAR’s championship media day that it was his idea to get his teammate to jog through Midtown Manhattan with the temperature in the mid-30s, joking that he was “just trying to hamper my competition” ahead of NASCAR’s title race.

Busch was going to get a few hundred dollars from them just for doing it, Truex, told For The Win on Thursday at NASCAR’s Media Day, adding that he initially put down $100. But they were going to kick in a few hundred more if he actually won the bet. Truex said he would double his offer while Hamlin’s payout went from $100 to $300.

Sweating and panting by the time he was done, Busch won the race by a lot.

It took him about 20 minutes to get to the hotel, and he FaceTimed with the other drivers still in the van to prove he made it. But that’s when they guessed something was amiss.

“Somebody’s full of [expletive] here,” Hamlin said in a video posted to his social media channels.

Turns out that while the driving route said their hotel was about five miles away, Busch looked at the directions for walking, which dropped the distance to fewer than two miles.

“I’m glad I had a witness go with me, and he’s just as whipped as I am,” Busch told his fellow championship contenders while FaceTiming with them.

“[I was] zig-zagging in and out of traffic, and it was pretty awesome. And I was in the middle of the street for a while.”

Eventually, Hamlin, Truex and Harvick figured out how Busch got the best of them. Obviously, they were in disbelief that Busch ran a 4.5-minute mile in shoes borrowed from the cameraman who tagged along, but not even two miles in 20 minutes makes a lot more sense.

“We just realized we got whamboozled, absolutely whamboozled,” Hamlin said in a video afterward. “We Wazed it at 5.2 miles. That seems like a really long way. However, if you click the ‘walk’ button, he only had to travel 1.8 miles. … He still put a decent pace on it. It is 30-some degrees out here.”

In the end, they combine to owe Busch “about a grand,” Harvick said at media day. But the three NASCAR drivers weren’t the only ones to get in on the bet, Truex told FTW.

During the press conference for the championship drivers Thursday, Busch said Truex still hasn’t paid up yet, and the No. 19 Toyota driver joked he’s “on a payment plan.”

“Although Kyle’s run was impressive, would have been more impressive if he would have had boots on and carrying a camera like the other guy,” Hamlin said.

But in addition to owing Busch money, Harvick had another form of punishment Tuesday as they finished their commute back to the hotel.

“I carried [his] shoes,” Harvick said Thursday of the kicks Busch changed out of. “I felt like I was obligated in losing the bet to carry his shoes back.”

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