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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Stewart Visits Twilight Zone
Tony Stewart has his worst finish of the season Saturday night at Bristol Motor Speedway...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted August 23, 2009   Bristol, TN
Tony Stewart finished 33rd in the Sharpie 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. (Photo: Getty Images)

If you wanted a quick and dirty way to sum up Tony Stewart’s season’s-worst 33rd-place finish in the Sharpie 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, it would be this: Better now than in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

The two-time NASCAR Sprint Cup champion and current series points leader seemed to be afflicted with every plague short of locusts, frogs and boils in his No. 14 Stewart-Haas Chevrolet Impala SS under the lights at the 0.533-mile oval.

“Well, I’m telling you, this was like an episode of the Twilight Zone,” said Stewart after completing his 22nd career Sprint Cup race at Bristol.

The mayhem began early.

SHARPIE 500 RESULTS

“How it started was I switched my frequency on my radio over to Ryan’s (Newman) channel to wish them luck, which is not uncommon, but I couldn’t go back to my channel,” said Stewart. “Every channel I went to, it was still them. And then I switched to the second radio, which is our backup radio, and I hadn’t even touched it, and it was them. So the first 200 laps, I’m listening to Ryan and his spotter. That’s what I was hearing on the radio. The reason I stayed on that and didn’t unplug the radio was because at least if a caution came out I could hear his spotter calling the caution out.”

With no radio communications, Stewart did things the old-fashioned way. If he put his hand on the A-pillar, the car was tight. If he put his hand on the door, the car was loose. How tight or how loose was crew chief Darian Grubb’s best guess.

Stewart pitted on Lap 15, his crew attempting unsuccessfully to fix the radio. In another stab at fixing the radio during a caution period on lap 137, Stewart was caught speeding off pit road. NASCAR penalized him a lap for the infraction, putting Stewart two laps down in 38th.

Finally, by Lap 257, after a series of pit stops to cure the team’s radio issues, his radio came back. But his night didn’t get any better.


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