Tony Stewart gives insight into the future of SRX

NASCAR team owner Tony Stewart spoke about his ambitions for SRX after a successful first season during the summer of 2021.

Tony Stewart, already an Indy Racing League champion and three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, can add that he is the inaugural SRX champion following the first season of the new stock car series he started with Ray Evernham.

SRX, short for Superstar Racing Experience, is a six-race Saturday night short track series that debuted this summer. There were 10 full-time drivers from various disciplines of motorsport and two cars reserved for different drivers at different tracks. All races were broadcast live on CBS at the same time each week.

With all things considered, the inaugural SRX season was a success. Attendance and TV ratings were through the roof, social media engagement was off the charts, and fans are already looking forward to what next season might hold when the summer of 2022 rolls around.

Stewart offered us some insight as to what that might look like.

“I think all of those are options and possibilities,” Stewart told Beyond the Flag when asked if SRX had any interest in adding more cars to the 12-car field, more races to the six-race schedule, and new tracks where the series didn’t race in 2021.

“I think adding more races is probably the toughest part of that if we’re going to do back-to-back races like we did this year. And I think that was a key to our success, was building momentum, fans knowing that every week it was going to be on the same channel in the same time slot for six straight weeks.”

The least likely addition among cars, races, and tracks? Races. The other two, however, Stewart would love to see — and believes could happen.

“So I don’t know that adding more races is necessarily an option,” he admitted. “Depending on funding, if we can get more funding, we definitely can add more cars, and I would entertain that as well. I think that’s something that if we could go from 12 cars to 14 or 16 cars, I would definitely be a fan of that. But it takes funding to do that, so that’s probably the most crucial part of it.”

Even more so than adding cars, however, Stewart wants to add new tracks. If there is one focal point for he series moving forward, this is it.

“I would like, I told Ray in our post-season meetings, I would like to see six totally different tracks for next year,” he said. “I love the tracks that we went to this year, and it’s not because we didn’t like those, but I think it would be really cool to go each season and go to six new tracks that we didn’t run the previous season, or even a previous year before that.”

And he wants at least one of those new tracks to feature both left and right turns.

“I would like to see at least one road course race added to the schedule next year,” he confirmed. “So finding a small enough road course to put on the product that we want will be the key to that, but we’ve gotta get some funding to fund these cars for next year before we do.”