About 45 minutes before midnight on July 7, a dark-haired man in a rental car pulled up to the main gate of Homestead-Miami Speedway, asking the security guard to see the track. The unexpected visitor whipped out an official NASCAR ID card. OK, it was enough for Bruno to at least make a phone call, despite knowing he would probably wake his boss, track vice president of operations Al GarcÃÂa. ”Hey, Al,” Bruno said. “You’ll never believe this, but I’ve got Tony Stewart here. I swear. I have his ID.” GarcÃÂa, who indeed had been sleeping, was ”shocked” and not exactly convinced. He asked Bruno to put the man claiming to be the defending Winston Cup champion on the phone. The voice on the other end said: “Hey Al, I’m coming back from the Keys and can’t get on my plane for another hour or two.” Stewart went on to explain that he had been scuba diving in Key Largo (on the day after the Pepsi 400 in Daytona Beach) and needed 12 hours to decompress between diving and flying. So, since he still had time to kill and just happened to be in the neighborhood, Stewart figured he would drop by to see how the $10 million reconfiguration project to add 18 to 20 degrees of banking was progressing. GarcÃÂa was now convinced, and a few minutes later the champion driver and the security guard were driving around the apron of the 1.5-mile oval in the dark in Stewart’s rental car. Stewart said Tuesday it was difficult to see much with only the headlights of his car, “but it looked like they did a lot of work in a short amount of time. From what the guy told me, they are going to put up one more foot of dirt and then start paving. I’m excited to see what it’s going to be like.” When told that the computer simulation done by Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. shows that there will be three distinct racing grooves on the track, which will have unique variable banking, Stewart was about as convinced as GarcÃÂa was when he first heard that Stewart was at his track at midnight. ”We’ll see,” Stewart said. ‘I hope it’s not like the Dynos [short for dynamometer, a machine that measures an engine’s horsepower]. A Dyno will say this motor is better and we should win and then when we don’t, the guys will say, `But the Dyno said we should win.’ I’ve never got a paycheck or a trophy from a Dyno.”(see full story at the Miami Herald )(7-16-2003)
