Stewart Ready to Talk Turkey

What does a champion race driver do for a vacation? If he’s Tony Stewart, he goes racing.

The newly crowned Winston Cup champion, who will collect almost $4 million next Friday in New York as his reward, will be at Irwindale Speedway tonight to race in the U.S. Auto Club’s 62nd Turkey Night Midget Grand Prix.

Stewart won the race in 2000 and missed it last year only because NASCAR scheduled a race in New Hampshire, postponed because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, on that weekend.

The switch isn’t something everyone can do -- from 3,400-pound, 800-horsepower stock cars to 900-pound, 300-horsepower midgets -- but Stewart revels in it.

“It’s kind of like taking off a pair of street shoes and slipping into a comfortable pair of old shoes,” Stewart said of the transition.

“Any time I can find the time to run a USAC midget, I’m going to do it. My roots are in USAC, and racing midgets is my way of having fun. So, I will be there.”

Stewart also has ties to the race through Cary Agajanian, his business agent whose family owns the USAC sanction to the Thanksgiving night race, and to car owner Steve Lewis, a Laguna Beach racing entrepreneur who provided him with a midget car in 1995 with which he won the series crown. He was also in Lewis’ car for his 2000 Irwindale win, and he’ll be in the same car tonight.

After tonight’s 100-lap race, Stewart will race Saturday night in Las Vegas and then head east for a weeklong NASCAR promotional tour of Washington and New York that will culminate in the Winston Cup awards banquet Friday night.

Indianapolis 500 winners often drove in the Turkey Night race in the 1950s and ‘60s, but this will be the first time a Winston Cup champion has been in the race.

Indy winners Bill Vukovich, Johnnie Parsons, A.J. Foyt and Parnelli Jones all won both events, and 500 winners Sam Hanks, Rodger Ward and Mario Andretti drove in Thanksgiving Night races but never won.

Stewart will be part of a five-car Ford-powered team entered by Lewis. His teammates are J.J. Yeley, USAC Silver Crown champion; Dave Darland, USAC midget champion; Kasey Kahne, former USAC midget champion and current Busch series driver; and Bobby East, whose father, Bob, built the Beast chassis for Lewis’ cars.

Darland holds an 83-point lead over Yeley in defense of his midget championship after finishing 10th last week in Tucson; Yeley was ninth. Only two races remain, tonight and Saturday in Las Vegas.

Dave Steele, last year’s Turkey Night winner, will be back in another of East’s cars, but powered by Mopar. Steele also won the richest midget event in history last September, sweeping a doubleheader at Indianapolis Raceway Park that paid him $60,280.

“I like Irwindale; I always run pretty good there,” said Steele, who won the first midget car race ever on the half-mile paved oval, March 27, 1999.

“It’s not a whole lot different from IRP, so we’ll just fine tune the car a bit and be ready to race.”

Brothers Cole and Dana Carter, third-generation Turkey Night drivers, are in the entry, which includes nearly every ranking midget driver in the country. Duane Carter, their grandfather, finished third in 1945 behind Danny Oakes and Duke Nalon, and Pancho Carter finished second in 1974 to Danny McKnight. Pancho, a 17-time starter in the Indy 500, is now managing his sons’ careers.

There will also be a 40-lap sprint car race and a 20-lap Ford Focus race. Qualifying will start at 4:30 p.m. with racing at 7.