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Race Takes Drivers Back To The Start

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By TONY FABRIZIO | The Tampa Tribune

Published: June 4, 2008

It's partly for charity, partly for fun, partly for pure love of racing.

And Tony Stewart's Prelude to the Dream is about one more thing: Bragging rights.

For the fourth consecutive year, several of NASCAR's top drivers - and an interesting mix of other drivers - will come together tonight for a pay-per-view TV event that aims to raise $1 million to support construction of a Victory Junction Gang Camp in Kansas City.

The drivers will compete in 2,300-pound, 800-horsepower dirt late-model stock cars at Rossburg, Ohio's Eldora Speedway, the historic, high-banked half-mile dirt track purchased by Stewart a few years ago.

They will race for free, but several of them will race to win.

"From what I've heard, the first time you go there you're just taking the experience in," said two-time defending Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, who is entered for the first time. "Then once you get out there and race a little bit, you get the bug and you want to come back the next year and test, maybe build your own race car and really go off the deep end with it."

Carl Edwards, who came up racing on dirt tracks in his native Missouri, returns to defend his title.

"Last year, I don't think anybody expected Kyle Busch to run as well as he did," Edwards said. "And I think that a lot of people were nervous that Jeff Gordon wasn't going to run that well. But then those two guys ended up being the guys I had to beat to win the thing.

"So I don't think there's someone you can point at. Anything can happen. Bill Elliott could win the thing. He's been running a lot of dirt."

Twenty-five drivers representing 26 major championships are entered, including former Sprint Cup champions Johnson, Gordon, Stewart, Elliott, Matt Kenseth and Bobby Labonte.

Tampa's Aric Almirola and Zephyrhills' David Reutimann are in the field. So are team owner and former champion crew chief Ray Evernham, ageless short track legend Red Farmer (actually, he's 76) and drag racers Ron Capps and Cruz Pedregon.

Ryan Newman and Kevin Harvick, the past two Daytona 500 winners, are entered. So is red-hot Busch, who is trying to pull off a ridiculous week that includes Eldora tonight, the Craftsman Truck Series race at Texas on Friday night, the Nationwide Series race at Nashville on Saturday night and the Sprint Cup race at Pocono on Sunday.

All proceeds are going to a new branch of the camp for chronically ill children started by the Petty family several years ago in North Carolina and the Tony Stewart Foundation.

"It's been an honor to have all these guys willing to donate their time and support what we're doing here," Stewart said. "The schedules every year gets more complicated, so to get a day on somebody's schedule is really big. We try to pay for the fuel for everybody's planes, and none of them have let us do it to date."

Although not all of the drivers entered started racing on dirt tracks, all except the drag racers started on short tracks of one type or another.

Racing at Eldora takes them back to their roots.

"I think a lot of the short-track racers think that we're just these big-time drivers that never had to cut our teeth and work our way up," Gordon said. "Sometimes we do get back to that. I think it shows the fans what kind of competitors we are to see us all having fun, knowing that we're not getting paid millions of dollars to do it."

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