It would be interesting to hear what Abraham Zapruder would say about the video that shows NASCAR racer Tony Stewart hitting 20-year-old sprint-car driver Kevin Ward, Jr. on August 9, killing him.
Zapruder, of course, took his Bell & Howell Model 414 PD Zoomatic Director Series movie camera with him when, on November 22, 1963, he went to see President John Kennedy travel in his motorcade through downtown Dallas. His 27-second movie has been analyzed constantly since, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that President Kennedy was assassinated by one person and multiple people, shooting from the Texas School Book Depository and the grassy knoll— and if you squint maybe you can see Fidel Castro in the crowd.
Zapruder died of stomach cancer in 1970, likely having no idea what he started. Certainly George Holliday knows: On March 3, 1991, he looked out his apartment window and saw police attempting to arrest—and then some—a man involved in a traffic stop named Rodney King. Thirty-one-year-old Holliday, a plumber, took his new Sony video camera out of the box, pointed it at King and the Los Angeles police, pressed “record,” and changed history.
The grainy video shot from the Canandaigua Motorsports Park grandstands in upstate New York won’t have the same historic impact as the Zapruder or Holliday recordings. Unless your name is Tony Stewart.
The accident occurred at about 10:30 p.m. the night of August 9. Forty-five minutes later, Ward was pronounced dead at the local hospital. The video was posted on YouTube even before Ward’s death was confirmed by the sheriff of Ontario County, New York, about 3 a.m. on Sunday, August 10, at which time the sheriff declined to identify Ward, even though Ward had already been identified by fans in the grandstands via Twitter. This is how it works in the age of social media: The world is notified before the next of kin.
The incident itself is a tragedy: The video of it is absolutely devastating. As was the case with the Zapruder film, the video from the speedway proves conclusively that Stewart meant to hit Ward; that Stewart did everything he could to avoid Ward; that Ward committed involuntary suicide by climbing from his disabled sprint car and going after Stewart, traveling 40 mph in an 800-hp race car with a 20-inch-wide Hoosier right rear tire, and there is nothing Stewart could have done.
Stewart goosed the throttle to hit Ward or, at the very least, scare him. And Stewart goosed the throttle as a desperate attempt to turn the car away from Ward. That’s because sprint cars, with a right rear tire that is much larger than the left rear tire—which, along with the track banking, helps turn the car left at 100 mph but requires the driver to steer to the right a bit in order to go straight—you turn right and hit the throttle to swing the car left.
Or so analysts—which includes anybody who either saw the video . . . or heard about it—are saying. So far, then, here is what we know absolutely, for sure: Tony Stewart’s sprint car went wide in Canandaigua’s Turn Two. Ward’s car was on Stewart’s outside. Ward ran out of room and hit the wall, flattening his right rear tire. The yellow flag went out, slowing the field to about 40 mph. Ward climbed from his car, walked with great purpose down the banking of the track, pointing at Stewart’s approaching car. Ward crouches slightly as Stewart approaches. The right side of Stewart’s car, including almost certainly the huge right rear tire, hits Ward. Ward’s body tumbles up the track, coming to rest prone, on his back, probably already dead from what the coroner later termed “blunt force trauma.” Stewart’s car comes to a stop about 150 feet farther down the track.
There are three interpretations of the video.
One, that Stewart—on a dusty, poorly lit track, peering through several layers of plastic “tear-offs,” which allow the driver to rip off one layer when it gets dirty—saw Ward at the last second and tried to avoid him by either swerving and/or gunning the throttle. There is no question that at or near the time of impact, the front wheels of Stewart’s car turn to the right for a moment. Those convinced that Stewart did nothing wrong cite the fact—and it is a fact—that sprint cars handle marvelously at 100 mph, when all that winged downforce and huge tires and “stagger,” which is when the tires on one side are of greater circumference than the other, come into play. At lower speeds, it is common for a sprint-car driver to use the throttle to turn the car but not the way you might think: To make the rear swing to the left, you steer to the right and hit the gas. Stewart’s defenders say that is what he was doing. The verdict based on a grainy video: innocent.
In the second interpretation, advocates insist that Stewart—who has shown emotion on and off the track to a degree that perhaps supports this conclusion—was trying to “dust off” Kevin Ward, to “teach him a lesson,” to brush him back the way a baseball pitcher does to a batter crowding the plate. Similarly, some suggest that Stewart was trying to spray Ward with dirt, sort of like you might drench someone with a Jet Ski. But on a track that has taken rubber and become what is called “dry slick,” there is no loose dirt in the groove available for spraying. So, to these true believers, Stewart was trying to teach Ward a lesson, and either he or Ward, or both, misjudged, or Ward lost his footing, or all of the above. The verdict: manslaughter, probably of the involuntary nature.
Finally, in the third interpretation, Stewart aims for Kevin Ward, Jr., and runs him down: simple as that. Those advocates argue that the number 45 car in front of Stewart managed to avoid Ward and that Stewart steered to the right and gunned the throttle not to avoid Ward, but to hit him. They bolster this argument with history, such as the time in August 2012 that Stewart threw his helmet at Matt Kenseth’s car and that in January 2011 Stewart got in a fight with a track promoter in Australia over the track’s unsafe conditions. From there, insist these theorists, you can draw a short line to Stewart willfully killing a 20-year-old driver whom he didn’t know and was presumably unaware had crashed because of a move Stewart made on the previous lap. Verdict: murder.
And those people exist. In a recent post on a column that I wrote for Motorsport.com, a commenter posted this: “BAN STEWART AND THROW HIM IN PRISON so he can be treated like the bitch he is!!!” The capitalization and exclamation marks are the commenter’s, not mine. In the thousands of comments on that story, there are many more posts that express that same sentiment.
As difficult as it is to determine what happened from that video, there is one very obvious aspect that is impossible to ignore: Kevin Ward, Jr., climbed from his car, thereby placing himself in harm’s way. Neither Canandaigua Motorsport Park nor the Empire Super Sprints sanctioning body had a rule specifically addressing such an action, but many tracks and series will soon.
The funeral for Kevin Ward, Jr., was held on Thursday, August 14 at a high-school auditorium, because it was clear the church where it was originally to be held would be far too small. The sheriff of Ontario County, New York, said it will likely be another two weeks before his investigation is complete. Police are also reviewing a second video that hasn’t been seen by the public; undoubtedly there are multiple ways to interpret that video, too.
At this writing, Tony Stewart remains in seclusion, reportedly staying with friends. His team announced that he will not participate in this weekend’s NASCAR Sprint Cup event at Michigan International Speedway. And the Empire Super Sprints are back in action the Friday night after Ward’s funeral—tonight—at Brewerton Speedway in New York for the “Wings and Warriors” show, where the rules had already been rewritten to discourage drivers from leaving their cars after an accident. (This morning, August 15, NASCAR announced a similar rule, declaring that drivers in wrecked cars are to stay buckled in “unless extenuating emergency conditions exist with the racecar.”)
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Fans and racers are encouraged to wear orange to honor Kevin Ward, Jr., whose cars always had orange highlights. From the track website: “Race fans of the Brewerton Speedway. We are asking for your help. As you know the Empire Super Sprint family lost one of their own this past weekend. In honor of Kevin Ward Jr. we ask you for a small favor. Each and every one wear orange, shirts, pants, hats . . . anything you have. Let’s make this the biggest Orange Out dirt track racing has ever seen.”
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