Tony Stewart decides on what he will do after retirement

Tony Stewart

Just over a month remains until Tony Stewart begins his final season in NASCAR's Sprint Cup series, but the future Hall of Famer isn't going to quit racing. Instead, he plans to return to his roots.

“I plan on running a lot of dirt races after the end of the season when I retire from the Cup stuff, so I would say this is on the radar," Stewart said during a press conference Monday at dirt racing's Chili Bowl Nationals in Tulsa, Okla.

The plans aren't a big surprise for Stewart, 44, who came up through the sprint-car and dirt-track ranks to IndyCar and NASCAR, continuing to race at small-town tracks during the week before heading to NASCAR Sprint Cup tracks on the weekend.

“The first time I won the Chili Bowl, we had already won the Triple Crown (USAC titles for sprints, midgets and Silver Crown) and won an IndyCar championship," Stewart said. "Winning the Chili Bowl, a one-race event, was bigger than winning the IndyCar championship to me. It was much harder to win the Chili Bowl. Everybody wants this trophy. It’s just a special deal."

The only driver in history to win a championship in both IndyCar and NASCAR, Stewart hasn't raced on a dirt track since an incident in 2014 at Canandaigua (N.Y.) Motorsports Park that killed Kevin Ward Jr. Stewart's car struck Ward, 20, after he walked onto the track to confront Stewart after a crash. The accident came nearly a year after Stewart broke his right tibia and fibula in a sprint car in Iowa, but "Smoke" isn't going to let those events get in his way of his beloved grassroots racing.

“There's great racing across the country and there's neat marquee events that you look at in the paper, and you're like, ‘Man, it would be really cool to try that,’" Stewart said in 2015. "We're now going to have that opportunity in a couple years to do that."

Stewart also hasn't ruled out racing in an occasional Xfinity or Camping World Truck series race, but one race he'll never enter again is the Indianapolis 500, he said last season. Sporting News