Nascar Legend Tony Stewart’s ‘New Money’ Part 1: Building The Brand

On a Sunday night in late February 1993 a 22-year-old was flying a redeye from Phoenix back to his Rushville, Indiana home. The young man knew it would be a rough Monday at his job in a machine shop where he made $5 an hour, cash. That young man was Tony Stewart, then an up-and-coming driver racing primarily in the USAC Midget Series.

Stewart had finished second to Mike Bliss in the Cooper World Classic at Phoenix Raceway that Sunday, and now faced an immediate future of going to work in the next few hours after trying to grab a few hours sleep on an airplane. Instead of napping however, he had a thought.

“My portion of the winnings was $3,500,” he said. And then he had a thought: “(it was) simple math to sit there on the red eye flight to be at work in Indiana at eight o’clock in the morning to get to my job: it was how many, $5 hours do I have to work to make $3,500?”

Tony Stewart knew then that in order to leave the days of $5 an hour jobs behind he needed to plan how better to take care of the money he was making in racing.

“When I moved from Rushville and got my first apartment, I remember through the winter, January it got extremely hard to pay for groceries to pay rent.

“And I learned that I had to figure out how to make what I made throughout the course of the season. I had to make it last through December, January through the middle of February, before I was able to drive a race car and make income again. So you start thinking about ‘how do I manage money at that point… that’s really where it started.”

Stewart said he got advice from Cary Agajanian, himself a legend in motorsports.

“Cary was really the one that was instrumental in my life,” he said. “I would say that got that ball rolling of understanding that,’ yeah, it looks great when you get that check and you win that race, and you want to go out and buy something nice or get something new.

“We always joke around, call it ‘new money’ when somebody gets in a big contract, and they go out and buy a house and a car and this and that. And it’s like, ‘yep, there’s new money going right there’.”

Stewart said it was Cary that helped him “understand that it’s a business like anything else. And especially when it’s seasonal, you have to be smart about it.”

Tony Stewart had already made a name for himself when it entered his first fulltime season in NASCSC
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R’s Cup series with Joe Gibbs Racing in 1999. He’d already won several USAC races and a title in that series in 1996, the same year he raced in what then was known at the Indy Racing League now the IndyCar series. In that series he would go on to win the title in 1997 and score three wins in 25 starts up to that point.

Stewart had raced in NASCAR lower-level Xfinity and Truck series prior to his fulltime Cup debut. He would take the NASCAR world by storm winning three races in his first season and easily grabbing Rookie of the Year honors. He would go on to win a total of 49 times in the Cup series, be crowned Cup champion three times, get inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2020, and along the way become part owner of his own NASCAR team with industrialist Gene Haas, Stewart-Haas Racing.

Safe to say, he put the days of $5 an hour working in a machine shop, way behind him.

In the years he raced in NASCAR from 1999 to his final fulltime season of 2015, Stewart’s earnings were just over $121 million. Those figures are just the prize money he made on the track, that doesn’t include the various endorsement and personal services deals he’s signed along the way.

It was Dale Earnhardt Sr. who first showed the rest of the NASCAR drivers how they could cash in on their name, their likeness, and even their car number. During his Hall of Fame career, Earnhardt was widely popular during NASCAR’s rise to mainstream prominence in the 1990s, creating a culture that had drivers looking beyond race winnings to licensing deals that could be worth far more. During that time however, not as much attention seemed to be paid to how to take care of all those earnings; how to make money, not necessarily how to hold on to it. There was money spent on big mansions, luxury yachts, and fast street cars. It was a time of high earnings and high living.

For his part, Stewart helped create a culture in NASCAR that has drivers understanding how to take care the money they make and keep more of it. And that culture has been fostered by Stewart himself who likes nothing more than passing his knowledge onto young drivers.

“I feel like there’s a responsibility for all of us in that category,” he said. “I think baseball players, football players, I think in all pro sports, there’s those people that are more than willing to share their experiences and share their knowledge.”

“When we all start and it’s all fresh and new and you got multi-year contracts, you’re just living in the moment and you’re excited that, you know, you’re not sitting there eating ramen noodles anymore,” he added laughing. “You know, you’re happy you get to go eat wherever you want that day. “

One of those young drivers is fellow Hoosier Chase Briscoe. Briscoe drives the No. 14 for Stewart-Haas Racing, and the same number Stewart raced in NASCAR. For Briscoe the chance to drive for his childhood hero is a dream come true. And while Stewart does impart a great deal of racing knowledge, Briscoe has a great role model to look up to for the business side of racing.

“To be able to literally call him or text him with any question or anything, concern wise, whether it is on the racetrack or off the racetrack is a huge blessing,” Briscoe said. “I mean, that guy on the racetrack obviously is one of the best of all times, but then off the racetrack he’s really done a lot of things that a lot of other people haven’t been able to say that they’ve done.

“Truthfully, I haven’t talked to him a whole lot about it just because I know I’m not really in a position to do those things, but you know, seeing it from a distance, from kind of at first afar, but then now being kind of behind the wall and being able to see it, it’s definitely been very eye opening and, and pretty amazing to see how he manages it all and how he can balance it all.”

Stewart said that he feels a responsibility, and a passion for him to make sure younger drivers have the knowledge needed to be successful on the track and off.

“Joe Gibbs did the same thing with me when I started,” he said. “Joe’s seen many athletes squander it away and three, four or five years after they’ve retired from playing football, they’re broke and have nothing to show for it.”

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