Stewart goes 'old school,' improves on car at Dover (cont'd)

It was on from there, as Stewart was asked to assess his first 12 races as an owner/driver.

"Just look at the stats," he said, laughing. "Just read what we say every week -- we say the same thing every week. All you have to do is just look at the last nine or 10 weeks and that'll tell you the whole story of what we think on that. We've said that enough, I think."

Late Model 101

Learn the basics of the car that will be driven in the Prelude to the Dream.

• Click here to watch video
• Prelude to honor military

A transcript doesn't do some questions justice, but Stewart made no effort to figure out if his questioner was either confused or just plain ignorant when he was asked "is the team working better with Hendrick Motorsports this year than in the past?"

"I didn't work with them in the past, so how am I going to know that?" Stewart said. "When you haven't worked with them before this year, you're not going to know how it was in the past. All I can go off of is what we've done this year with them, which has been great.

"We've had a great relationship with them and I enjoy working with them, so far. So it's hard to say what it was like there before you run with them."

The media, undeterred, asked Stewart one more question about he and Newman's car setups, then asked about Eldora Speedway, the Ohio short track Stewart owns where the fifth annual Prelude to the Dream dirt late-model charity event will be held on Wednesday.

Stewart's patience appeared to be getting short when he was asked about his entrepreneurial success, which he attributed to putting good people in the right places, but then "how do you find those people?"

"Oh, we sit at an Ouija board all day," Stewart said.

"Do you have a better answer?" Stewart was asked.

"No, I don't -- we just work at it," Stewart said. "I mean, it's just like [Saturday]. We're trying to figure out how to make our race cars go faster and people want me to theorize about this and that. I'm still trying in my mind how to get my race car to go faster right now."

On the plus, "calmer Tony" side, Stewart did answer eight more questions, some in depth and some not so much; but he hit "tilt" when he was asked if everything he had going on overwhelmed him?

"No, I get overwhelmed with all the stuff that I'm asked to do while I'm trying to worry about driving a race car; that's what gets overwhelming," Stewart said. "I've sat here and I've talked about Dale [Earnhardt] Jr. and I've talked about Thunder Road and I've talked about Eldora and I've talked about the business side -- and I'm still trying to figure out what I've got to do on the driver's side right now.

"That's a perfect example of how overwhelming this part of it is. It's always about something else that doesn't pertain to what you're doing, a lot of times."

Finally, Stewart refused to elaborate on the post-race text message he sent to Coca-Cola 600 race winner David Reutimann this past Monday at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

"I didn't do that for everybody to know about that, I just did it for me and him," Stewart said. "It was more to congratulate him because I like David."