Tony Stewart, a three-time Nascar champion, was moonlighting Saturday night. He had gone back to his racing roots for a few hours, competing in a local dirt-track event at Canandaigua Motorsports Park in upstate New York, bumping and sliding his high-powered open-wheel sprint car with the mostly unknown competitors on the track.
There was nothing unusual about Stewart’s presence there, or about the hit that he delivered to Kevin Ward Jr.'s racecar that sent it spinning into the outside wall during the race. And it was not all that surprising to see Ward, 20, unbuckle his seatbelts, jump out of the racecar and look to confront Stewart on the track. It happens sometimes in racing. Stewart himself had done that in a 2012 Nascar race.
But what happened next was hard for anyone to fathom, and available for the world to see in a widely circulated video. As Ward stood on the track and pointed at Stewart, Stewart’s racecar fishtailed, the right tire hitting Ward and dragging him under the car. Ward was thrown several feet and lay motionless on the track. He was later pronounced dead at F. F. Thompson Hospital.
Sign up with Google