•• Te load on his shoulder, Tony Stewart
says, “just [took] the wind right out of you.” Back-to-back crashes at Charlotte Motor
Speedway left Stewart with a broken right shoulder blade and his Joe Gibbs Racing team in scramble mode. Coming off a champi- onship season and with Stewart fourth in points, limiting the damage to the team’s championship chances was of utmost impor- tance — even with its driver ailing on the sidelines. “From a driver’s standpoint, from a selfish
standpoint, yeah, you don’t want to get out of the car,” says Stewart, a two-time Cup cham- pion. “You want to be selfish because you want to be in the car.” With the series preparing to head to
Dover the following weekend, there was little doubt that a relief driver would be required.
Veteran Ricky Rudd would hop in the car after Stewart started the race. “Tose guys didn’t ask for that; it wasn’t
their fault that it happened,” Stewart says. “So the best thing to do was not be selfish and try to stay in the car [at Dover] and then all of a sudden at lap 350 say, ‘I’m falling out of the seat. I’m a lap down because of it,’ then turn it over to another guy and he has to try and claw his way back up through there in 50 laps. “So it was better to get out of the car and
let him get started working his way back up through the field.” Had Dover not been the next stop,
Stewart says a relief driver likely wouldn’t have been necessary. But the combination of speed and high banking on the 1-mile track dictated otherwise. “Dover, unfortunately, is not a cake-
walk,” he says. “It’s pretty demanding. It was just a bad weekend to have that kind of
“Adrenaline will cover a lot of the pain, but it will
only do it for so long.” —TONY STEWART
a problem. We could have went to Loudon and probably been fine, or Martinsville. But not Dover. “You dive down into the [first] corner
and that initial load is what hurt every time it landed. And then it would just hold that load down there. It was that landing at the bottom of the hill that was the worst. Ten you’d get a little bit of a break on the straightaway and you’d try to catch your breath. Because when you’ve got pain like that around your ribs and shoulder blade, it takes the wind out of you. It takes you a second to get your wind back. It’s just always taking the wind out of you.” Anticipating an early caution, Stewart
says he didn’t expect to run more than a handful of laps before turning the car over to Rudd. Instead, the race stayed under green- flag conditions for nearly 40 laps before the day’s first yellow flag. Te race, he says, “went and it went and
went and went and went.” Te broken shoulder blade was Stewart’s
first injury in a Cup car, but it was far from his first racing-related injury. He’s raced midgets with a broken wrist “and they just taped my hand to the steering wheel,” he says. “Everybody in this garage has had to do
something like that at some point. It’s just what you do. “Adrenaline will cover a lot of the pain,
but it will only do it for so long. And then your body’s tolerance for pain gives up and says, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ It’s just what your body tells you.”
•• “I’ve never been so glad to see a driver
climb out of a car in all my life,” Hall of Fame car owner Bud Moore says. Te ageless Moore saw his share of trag-
edy during his nearly four decades in the sport. In fact, in the span of less than one year, he witnessed two of his own drivers lose their lives — Joe Weatherly at Riverside in 1964 and Billy Wade at Daytona in 1965. So when Ricky Rudd turned sideways
coming off Turn 4 at Daytona during the 1984 Busch Clash, Moore said he feared the worst. Te air rushing underneath Rudd’s car lifted it off the ground as it headed toward
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