Stewart sore but OK after hard crash at Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS -- For a few anxious moments after his wreck on Lap 109 of the UAW-Dodge 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Sunday, driver Tony Stewart's legs were tingling so badly that he wondered if he had injured himself seriously.

But after sitting in his car as rescue workers swarmed about and then being helped from it to a waiting ambulance, the feeling in his legs returned fairly quickly, if not completely, following the short ride to the LVMS infield care center. After a quick check with physicians there and about 15 minutes later, Stewart walked out of the care center under his own power and chatted amicably with reporters.

Tony Stewart

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He even closed that conversation with a couple jokes, proving he hadn't lost his sense of humor in the accident.

"It kind of worried me because my legs from my hips on down were just tingling, and I had pain in my lower back. That kind of scared me for a minute," Stewart said. "The whole time from there to here [in the ambulance], that sensation was there. It's not gone completely now.

"It's just that you hit hard. You hit all the padding in there for the leg braces. I've never had my legs tingle like that. I was kind of worried like, 'What's going on here?' It wasn't just like one of them was doing it; they both were."

Stewart definitely hit the outside wall hard after blowing his right-front tire just as he entered Turn 3. He then slid along with the wall before his car finally came to rest against it near Turn 4 (watch video).

"We just lost the right-front tire -- and when we did, it just took off. It was a really big-angle hit, it seemed like to me," he said.

Complicating matters was the fact that it was his second bad wreck in as many days. He also wrecked out of the Nationwide Series race at LVMS on Saturday, injuring his right foot and ankle in the process (watch video).

That was perhaps what hurt him the most Sunday -- because he absorbed blows to the same areas of his ankle and foot that he had first bruised on Saturday.

"This didn't help anything," Stewart said. "[Saturday] we hit the left side. The left side of my foot hit the pedal. ... When you hit that hard, everything bounces off the padding in there. It just hit the pedal again. It just hit a spot that was already tender and sore."

"I hit the inside of my right foot against the pedals Saturday. ... It bruised it. It just bounced off of it. But [Sunday's] hit felt about 10 times harder than [Saturday's]."

Stewart said initially he was mostly worried about that injury. But then he developed what he thought was a more serious concern.

"That's what hurt when I stopped. But then it was like my legs were tingling like they were about half-numb," Stewart said. "My lower back is sore, too, but that's probably just from tensing up on the way to hitting the wall. When you see the wreck coming and you know you're not going to miss it, every muscle in your body tenses up -- so that just makes it worse."

Some teams complained about their tires during Sunday's event. But Stewart said he had no complaints about them, and neither did his crew chief, Greg Zipadelli.

"They were fine right up until it blew out. We didn't have any problems. The tires that came off our car looked really good, Zippy said, so we weren't having any issues," Stewart said.

"I was a little bit tight, but it wasn't like we were sliding right-front really bad. We were tight. Instead of making my problem worse and trying to overdrive the car and put myself in that position -- which happened anyway -- we were trying to be smart about it. But I don't think [the accident] was because we were tight. We weren't that far into the run. We still had 20 laps left in the run, basically, so we shouldn't have had that problem. It was just something that was a freak thing."

Then Stewart parted with a surprising smile and a joke. When asked if he was feeling a little fuzzy in the head after the hit, he laughed and replied: "There's nothing in my head anyway, so there's nothing for it to knock around really. It's kind of like the wind blowing. It just is where it is."