What makes Stewart so special?

ThatsRacin.com Opinion

DAVID POOLE / The Charlotte Observer

Thursday, Apr. 26, 2007

Elevator

UP arrow for Car of Tomorrow The first three races with the new car have had remarkable finishes. That’s a pretty good batting average.

DOWN arrow for Trash-throwing fans

If throwing bottles and/or cans seems to be an acceptable way to express displeasure, you have no business being allowed outside of your house.

SIDEWAYS arrow for Talladega Fans eat it up, but I still say they need to fix the track.

My two cents

Make excuses for him if you want to – goodness knows plenty of people get paid good money to do that – but Tony Stewart was just flat wrong to skip his postrace media obligations at Phoenix.

Stewart loves to lecture about how new drivers sometimes don’t understand how things are done in the sport.

But that applies to Stewart, too. NASCAR, the teams and the media have worked on postrace procedures so things are done in a way that makes the most sense for everybody.

Stewart now says he skipped out because he didn’t want to bash NASCAR for “bogus” cautions. Then, on his Sirius NASCAR Radio show, he let NASCAR have it with both barrels on that topic. Rest assured that is now officially a very big story.

If a two-time champion says NASCAR hasn’t run a “fair” race all year, that’s news. He put himself right in the middle of a jackpot he says he was trying to avoid, and now he doesn’t even have the media to blame for causing that.

Stewart also said that he has no obligation to speak to the media after driving his race car. He said that’s not in his contract and it’s not a part of his job.

This, of course, is absurd. If dealing with the media isn’t part of a Nextel Cup driver’s job, why do most drivers go through media training at their team’s behest?

At drivers’ meetings before every Cup race, NASCAR reviews its policies for the event. Pit road speed is announced. Other rules and procedures are reviewed. At every one of these meetings, drivers are told that the top-three finishers go to the media center after the race. Every other driver in the sport manages to comply. What makes Stewart so special that he doesn’t have to?

Observations