MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Feb. 19, 2019) – The Dale Jr. Download is a pretty popular program in its own right. Dale Earnhardt Jr., Mike Davis and Matthew Dillner regularly put together an hour or so of Grade-A, prime-time programming that is the lynchpin of Dirty Mo Media’s appeal to the masses.

Add in three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Tony Stewart to the mix and it’s a recipe to blow the roof off any joint you want to name. Smoke brought the show to the Dirty Mo Media studios inside JR Motorsports this week, and what resulted was a bare-knuckle dive into all sorts of topics.

The two met, oddly enough, in the NASCAR hauler at Pikes Peak International Raceway (now defunct but still a beautiful place) following an on-track incident.

Earnhardt Jr. set the stage for that meeting. “It was at Pikes Peak, and I was trying to pass Tony and running into him over and over, and he finally punted me down into Turn 1 on a restart,” he said. “They asked us to come to the NASCAR hauler. We went, and there was an altercation and pushing and shoving between me and his crew chief. Tony (Eury) Sr. was kind of in it, Stewart was in it...”

The two had never really met, and here they were, involved in a scuffle in the NASCAR hauler. Stewart still had a supermodified race to run and the cars were lining up, so there was a time crunch involved. So it accelerated.

“There was a match flame that was here and we were the ones that put the gallon of gas on top of it and then got out of the way to watch it flare up and watch our guys do all the rest of the work with each other,” Stewart said with a chuckle.

The explanation for the on-track incident was, honestly, simple. 

“I didn’t really understand the etiquette,” he said. “He (Dale Jr.) was faster than me, but I wasn’t used to the etiquette of, ‘you get the warning a couple of times and you kind of get moved out of the way the next time.’ I was still learning that part of it. Here he is, hammering on me, and I’m not picking up the hint that I just need to get out of the way and let him go and figure it out later. I’m still racing his guts out, because that’s the style I came from.

“He was actually nice about it; (he) had about eight opportunities to flat dump me and just be done with it and never put me in that spot.”

Earnhardt Jr. followed up.

“I remember trying to pass him on the inside of Turns 3 and 4 and I kept getting loose and sliding up,” he said. “The only thing saving me was him (Stewart), and it kept happening over and over and over again. I would slide into him.”

Stewart was coming off a three-week stretch in which his travel schedule was, in a word, crowded. Prior to visiting JRM for the show, it went something like this: “The last three weeks I’ve pretty much lived in Florida, racing my sprint car,” he said. “I’ve run 10 races already this year, been to Ocala, Volusia, East Bay...this weekend we have another race in Florida. I literally go home (Monday), home for one day tomorrow, I have a store grand opening on Wednesday in Tennessee, a dinner on Thursday, then we’re at Atlanta on Friday. That night I go to Florida to race, come back to Atlanta for the Xfinity race on Saturday, fly back to Florida to race, fly back to Atlanta for the Cup race on Sunday.”

So, as a former driver who now owns multiple racing teams, why would you work that hard? If you know Tony Stewart, that’s an easy answer.

“That’s all I really want to do,” was the reply. “The rest of it has to fit in around that. It’s like I told everybody when I “retired,” when I quit driving in NASCAR and went back to run sprint cars: I literally have the best of both worlds. I have 99 races on my schedule this year and am probably going to add four or five more in the next couple of weeks. If you’re going to be good at anything, you’ve got to be doing it all the time. Running the winged sprint cars that I’m running right now, there’s a lot of guys that are a lot better than me and the only way I’m going to get caught up and be competitive is to be racing every possible night I can race.”

To hear all of this and more—including some of Stewart’s greatest hits and the always-popular #AskJr segment--on this week’s episode, click here or download from any of the major podcast outlets.