News this week of Tony Stewart’s move from the sportsman-level Top Alcohol Dragster category to the NHRA’s professional headliner Top Fuel class was not much of a jolt.

That his wife, Leah Pruett, who executed a riveting run and lost a winner-take-all showdown to Doug Kalitta by .064 of a second last month, chose to step from the cockpit to concentrate on starting a family took the drag-racing community by surprise Thursday.

“I think we’ll be fine. And I plan to return to the seat as soon as I can,” Pruett said. Her husband was not quite as bold.

He said, “My goal is to not suck. My goal is to not get fired by my wife and not kill myself driving this thing. So I think we’ll be fine. It is just going to be a matter of time. Every time we’ve jumped into a different type of race car in different form of motorsports, there’s always a learning curve. And this is no different.

“This [the 11,000-horsepower, nitro-burning dragster] has probably been one of the hardest things that I’ve ever had to learn to drive,” Stewart said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m not smart or what, but I keep throwing big challenges in my racing career. And this was one that wasn’t planned.

“When Leah said it was her decision, the very first conversation we had about it, I spent the first 30 seconds in husband mode in the discussion and then morphed into car-owner mode, knowing the timing of this and how it could affect a season or two seasons. And by the end of a 10-minute conversation,” he said, “I realized if I didn’t shut up soon, I wasn’t going to have to worry about it. She would divorce me.”

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Pruett gave a “He’s incorrigible” wifely wag of her head and chuckled at his humor. But she was serious when she said, “He has a lot of reservations about . . . He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And he’s had some great testing laps, has learned some things in the fuel car that are not transactional with the alcohol car. And so he’s got this huge learning curve. Everyone has this huge learning curve. Sure, he does – everybody does. And I think he’s finally over the stage at some point when yeah, all eyes are going to be on him in the beginning for a little while. And then it’s just going to be, I feel like, status quo after that.”

She admitted that “when NHRA said [Thursday’s announcement at the PRI Show at Indianapolis] was ‘NHRA’s biggest announcement’ and everyone’s guessing all over the board, I was like, ‘That’s a tall title to follow up with.’ But I think Tony Stewart taking on another professional motorsport as a driver to add to his list of [achievements], that’s a big deal. And it is the biggest outside name that NHRA has ever had coming in. So I think it’s worthy of the title.

My goal is to not suck. My goal is to not get fired by my wife and not kill myself driving this thing. – Tony Stewart

“For the record,” Pruett said, “we are not starting a family right now. I’m not pregnant. I do plan to run the PRO race in Bradenton [Fla.] in March. Tony has had shoulder surgery two weeks ago. That’ll take two months, two months to heal, but I knew much earlier this season that 2024 would be the year that I would like to start the family. I say ‘I,’ because Tony has left this in my lap and my decision of when.”

Tony Stewart said, “We just were a little more strategic. And I, out of respect for my wife, just literally said, ‘This is a tough decision for you, and whenever you want to do this, I’m supportive.’ And I literally did put it all in her hands on making that decision for us.”

He said he has been asking himself whether he’s more scared of driving a race car that can zip the length of three football fields in less than four seconds, one that measures fuel in gallons per mile rather than the opposite, or becoming a father.

But he has concluded that “I’m way more scared about starting a family. I can barely take care of myself. I’ve joked around – I’m like, ‘If this kid – if and when that happens –can make it to three years old on its own, it’s got a shot at surviving.’ So I don’t have any experience as a parent. But I have a lot of experience driving, and this is definitely one of the biggest jumps I’ve ever made in my driving career. But at least I have a little bit of an idea of what to expect. What’s going on the family side of it . . . I’m still learning how to try to be an average husband at best at this point and trying to learn how to be a father at the same time. It’s just another challenge, but that’s what our life’s all about. It’s always about unique and new challenges and how to accomplish our goals.”

Curiously, Stewart wasn’t a shoo-in as the driver to replace Pruett as the Top Fuel component of Tony Stewart Racing, as the teammate to reigning and four-time Funny Car champion Matt Hagan.  After all, he has shunned talk for nearly two years about his readiness and his desire to take on Top Fuel’s idiosyncrasies.

Just days before, during a Race Industry Week conference call, Tony Stewart once again had insisted, “I enjoy the Top Alcohol Dragster class. Even though it’s considered a sportsman class, it is so much fun. I think everybody’s hoping [Top Fuel is] the direction we’re going to go. I’m happy doing what I’m doing right now, to be honest. I had a blast in the Top Alcohol [Dragster] class. Running in Top Fuel would be the worst thing I could do for my relationship with my wife. If we have to race each other and I win, I immediately get an E-Ticket to sleep on the couch for the rest of my life. I’ll never get invited back to the bedroom. If she beats me, then every morning when I go I front of the mirror in the bathroom and look at myself when I get up and right before I go to bed, I can’t even look at myself because I got beat by my wife. That’s how competitive we are. Leah seems to think it wouldn’t be that bad. And it’s not bad until it happens. So I feel like my experience in racing, I feel like it’s something that doesn’t make sense for me to do that. And Matt Hagan’s way too big for me to kick his butt and kick him out of his car. So we’ve got two great drivers and teams in the pro categories. And I’m content being a sportsman driver.”

At the top of the list initially was radial tire and Pro Modified veteran Lyle Barnett. Pruett called him “an incredible individual” who “deserves a spot in a seat,” However, she said, he didn’t have Top Fuel experience and Stewart had made 20 runs in a dragster “and had been proving himself” in the McPhillips family’s Top Alcohol dragster. She pointed out that Stewart “had some challenges and Tony navigated them very well.” She said he had the best reaction-time average in the class, especially impressive for a rookie with no drag-racing experience at all.

Moreover, she gave Tony Stewart high marks for starting-line presence: “You have full-season veterans in that class for decades to second-generation drivers to first-year drivers. Tony, being a rookie and being able to let them know what’s up on the starting line every single time and putting the fear of God into some of them, that’s something that you look for when you want somebody in this car. We spend thousands, tens of thousands of dollars to look for five-thousands of a second here, maybe even a hundredth within the performance of the car. When you have a driver that is proving those capabilities of grabbing four-hundreds here, three-hundreds there, maybe even five, that’s extremely valuable.”

Pruett proved to be an effective teacher with “him operating that race car in all different types of situations from shaking, smoking, pedaling, operating very safe, knowing the cadence, not letting anybody rattle him, shutting the car down properly.” She praised his “intuition with all of the logic of the car. Me seeing his evolution of understanding how that car operates, we were able to have much more thorough conversations when it came to the Top Fuel car and what we had been working on. And so me seeing him grow in such a small amount of time, there was no question in my mind that he is the right fit for this position.”