 
Defending
Champion Stewart Seeks Chili Bowl Repeat
Saturday, January 12 from Tulsa, Okla.
Live on HBO Pay-Per-View
from
Motorsports Management, TULSA, OKLAHOMA
(January 4, 2008) – Tony Stewart has won
32 NASCAR Nextel Cup races, led the 24
Hours of Daytona, and started from the
pole position in the Indianapolis 500.
Clearly, the 36-year-old driving star from
Columbus, IN, knows a thing or two about
world-class venues and motorsports events
surrounded by high publicity and
international intrigue. And yet it is a
Midget-car contest held each January
inside a converted rodeo arena and
livestock hall in Oklahoma that Stewart
calls “the best race of the year for
me.”
Stewart, the NASCAR
NEXTEL Cup champion in 2002 and 2005,
declares, “Yeah, if I could run only one
race a year, and I had to pick, it would
definitely be the Chili Bowl.”
He is referring to
the Lucas Oil Chili Bowl Midget Nationals,
the 22nd annual edition of which will be
held Jan. 8-12 inside the Tulsa Expo
Center. Saturday night’s headline action
will be televised live, for the first
time, on HBO Pay-Per-View.
The Chili Bowl, in
Stewart’s opinion, is “the toughest
race to win,” and he should know. Twice,
in 2002 and ’07, he has emerged as the
victor in the Saturday-night A-Main
finale, one of the most coveted
short-track events in America. This year,
some 280 plus Midgets are expected to haul
to Tulsa for the mid-winter classic.
“When you’ve got
[that many] guys that come to one track to
try to make a 24-car starting field, and
you beat those guys, that’s
something,” says Stewart. “You just
don’t get lucky and do that. That’s
something you have to earn. I mean, the
pressure is very intense to perform well
– not only for myself, but for everybody
there – because there’s so many great
champions from so many different parts of
the country, and they want to prove that
they’re the best.”
Stewart has been a
semi-regular entrant in the Chili Bowl,
missing some years due to conflicts with
his NASCAR and Indy Car duties. But,
whenever time has allowed and good rides
have been available, he has come to Tulsa
each January since the mid-1990s, when he
was a dirt-track regular piling up feature
wins from Ohio to California and earning a
pair of United States Auto Club (USAC)
National Midget championships, not to
mention titles in USAC’s Silver Crown
and Sprint Car divisions.
Always, his Chili
Bowl philosophy has been the same: “Plan
ahead.” A driver cannot win on Saturday
night without first surviving the rugged
qualifying nights on the tight Expo oval,
when he is put to the test by heat races,
last-chance events and preliminary
features, not to mention rivals he may be
seeing for the first time since the
previous year’s Chili Bowl. Toss in the
ever-changing nature of dirt-track racing,
and the whole exercise becomes as much a
mental challenge as a physical contest.
“You always have to
be paying attention,” Stewart declares.
“During your preliminary night, you have
to watch the racetrack and see how it
changes. You don’t necessarily want your
car to be handling perfect the first five
laps [of the prelim feature]; you have to
know what you need your car to be doing
the last five laps, and how to set it up
for that.
“There are so many
good guys, great championship drivers,
that won’t make the A-Main. So the goal
is to get yourself in the A-Main, and
then, once you get yourself in the
‘A,’ finish as high as you can
finish.”
If all goes according
to his plan, that will mean a third Chili
Bowl championship, and a third “Golden
Driller” trophy emblematic of the
accomplishment. But Stewart, though
generally a bright-eyed optimist, is
realistic enough to know that no race
tests the best-laid plans like the Chili
Bowl.
“There’s so many
great guys,” he says. “It’s like
going to an all-star game, an all-star
event.
I mean, you are racing against the
best.”
ABOUT
CHILI BOWL TELECAST:
Watch the live
television broadcast of the 2008 Lucas Oil
Chili Bowl Midget Nationals on Saturday,
Jan. 12, at 8:00 p.m. ET. The HBO
Pay-Per-View telecast has a suggested
retail price of $24.95 and will be
available to more than 61 million
pay-per-view homes in the United States
and Canada and millions more worldwide.
Order directly from your digital cable or
satellite TV system or contact your
provider's customer service for details. A
subscription to HBO is not required. Visit
http://www.hbo.com./events/chili.
###
Media
Assets:
For photos and logo
assets for editorial use, please visit:
http://sportssystems.com/hosting/display.cfm?key=100736
To view :30
television promo spot, please visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF9E4d4gp60
Contact:
media@motorsportsmanagement.com
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