Tony Stewart: 'It’s costing us more money than it’s ever' to compete in NASCAR
Tony Stewart says NASCAR’s promise of lower costs with the current Cup Series car has not been realized.
The Stewart-Haas Racing co-owner and three-time Cup champion sat down for an interview with NBC Sports this week after SHR announced that Josh Berry would be replacing the retiring Kevin Harvick in the No. 4 car. Stewart touched on a number of topics in the interview and made it clear that teams are spending more on cars.
"For partners coming into the sport now, it’s a financial risk," Stewart said. "It’s not got cheaper to operate a NASCAR team like this new car was designed. It’s costing us more money than it’s ever cost us to run these cars."
The car NASCAR calls the “NextGen” was introduced in 2022 and is built from spec parts supplied by a list of approved vendors. One of the major selling points of the new car was its potential cost reductions for teams because they wouldn’t be making as many parts in-house.
But the car has undergone significant changes since its introduction as NASCAR has made changes to both improve safety — multiple drivers were injured in 2022 — and to improve the racing at short tracks and road courses. Those changes cost money, even as NASCAR said it was footing the bill for some safety-related changes ahead of this season.
Stewart also said that NASCAR has done a “good job of trying to discourage teams from going above and beyond” the rule book when it comes to finding speed advantages with the current car. SHR driver Chase Briscoe was penalized 120 points and the team was fined $250,000 for a counterfeit part earlier this season at Charlotte. The team said after the penalty was announced that the part on the car was a “quality control lapse.”
Briscoe’s penalty is one of numerous major inspection-related penalties that have been handed out over the course of the season. Hendrick Motorsports has been penalized multiple times, while Kaulig Racing and Richard Childress Racing have also received significant penalties.
Why so many penalties this season? Stewart, the 2002, 2005 and 2011 Cup champ, also noted the role that he believes betting on the races plays when it comes to NASCAR’s actions and enforcement of the rule book thanks to the changes that have been made over the past 30 years to the ways races are officiated.
"This really boils down to one thing," Stewart said. "You’ve been a part of this sport, we’ve all been a part of this sport forever. It’s all about control. Before we had timing lines on pit road, they had two people in the scoring booth with a stopwatch in each hand. You can only control four cars out of 43 cars down pit road. If you ruffled their feathers and upset them, you were probably going to get a pit road speeding penalty the next week. You could guarantee it. That was NASCAR’s way of keeping everybody in check.
"Now, they’ve backed themselves in a corner with the greed to the gambling side of this. They can’t manipulate the race. They can’t call somebody for a pit road speeding penalty if they didn’t commit the act. They can’t control that. They can’t throw bogus cautions to bunch the field back up. … How do you control everybody then if you’ve taken that ability away during the race? How do you do it? You do it at the R&D Center after the races are over. If somebody’s ruffling your feathers, that’s where they’re going to get you.
Debris cautions have declined since NASCAR instituted stage racing with two guaranteed caution flags per race in 2017. The legitimacy of some cautions for debris — especially after a long stretch of green-flag racing when cars were far apart from each other on track — was long greeted with skepticism by many in the 2010s.
Pit road speed is now monitored via a sequence of timing lines and each track is equipped with a camera system to allow NASCAR to watch for pit stop violations on each team rather than relying solely on an official on pit road watching a pit stop.
And Stewart might have brought up the gambling aspect because of NASCAR's embrace of betting on races. There are multiple NASCAR "authorized" gaming operators and no sports series wants to have any hint of impropriety when money is being legally wagered on an event.
"So, it shouldn’t be a surprise. … They’re going to find things like they’ve always done in the history of the sport, and they have to police the sport," Stewart continued. "You can’t fault them for that. Some of the ways they’ve tried to keep balance and control, some of their decisions — fans aren’t stupid, you guys in the media are not stupid — it’s very plain of how they’re controlling it and how they’re trying to keep everybody in check.
"I think it’s important that they do keep aspects of this in check. You can’t lose control of that. If you do, it becomes a free-for-all and then they’ve lost everything they’ve built over 75 years. Some of (the penalties), I think, they went overboard and above and beyond this year."
