Tony Stewart has been an unlucky man. Though his last two seasons have been unfortunate, this other misfortune runs deeper, about 16 years' worth.
In an interview with Autoweek, Stewart talks about the missing piece of his résumé - winning the Daytona 500.
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Stewart has had 16 starts in the event, beginning in 1999. He finished runner-up in 2004 and said his third-place finish in 2008 still haunts him. But he says an underlying factor of the race itself stacks the odds even against the best drivers with the best cars.
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"Someone described racing on the superspeedways of being a combination of a science project and the luck of a casino, and it's exactly that way," he told Autoweek. "You do everything in your power to take care of the science or technology side. You do everything you can to build the fastest car. If you don't have the luck to go with it - even if you don't have any drama with getting the car touched, nothing happens to the car - if you're just in the wrong spot at the wrong time, it can take you out of the opportunity to take the best race car in the field and win."
Stewart blames the restrictor-plate limitation that comes along with Daytona that takes a lot of the control away from the individual driver as to success within the race.
"... It's still always frustrating when you have to rely on what everybody else does," Stewart said of the strategy in restrictor-plate races. "It's not what you do. It's what you do along with somebody else who decides that they're going to follow you and help you. That's the part that frustrates you as a driver. The great thing about restrictor-plate racing though is that 43 cars all have the same shot at winning the race, but again, that's also part of what makes it frustrating, too. It's just being at the right place at the right time."
But it's the possibility of winning that jackpot that keeps Stewart going. Even after a horrific accident in 2013 forced him to undergo four leg surgeries -- with one left in 2015 -- and his involvement in the death of fellow driver Kevin Ward at a dirt track in New York last August, Stewart hangs on to his dream.
"You look at marquee events around the world, and not only in NASCAR but in all of motorsports - the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the 24 Hours at Daytona, the Indy 500, the Knoxville Nationals - and to be a driver that can cross off one of those marquee events as a winner, that cements your legacy in motorsports," he said. "To be able to win the Daytona 500 is the ultimate dream of a race car driver."
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