Eight years on from the young driver’s death, a new documentary seeks to answer questions about a deadly night on dirt track
One evening, eight years ago this month, a 20-year-old stock car driver named Kevin Ward Jr turned up to a mud-packed oval circuit in upstate New York for a minor-league race. About halfway through, he was bumped by a rival car and sent spiraling into a barrier. Seeing red, Ward exited his vehicle and charged down the banked circuit to vent his frustration. Several cars tacked down to the inside-most line to avoid him. But when the car that had ended Ward’s race approached, it veered up toward the young driver, and flung him 25 feet across the track to his death. Spectators at Canandaigua Motorsports Park gasped. They hadn’t just witnessed the horror of a driver killed in competition. They saw Ward, a local hero and ascendent talent, run over by Nascar megastar Tony Stewart.
A three-time Cup champion, Stewart, then 43, was moonlighting in the race ahead of a Nascar road race at Watkins Glen. Immediately after Ward’s death, officially ruled an “accident,” public sympathy swamped Stewart. Ward, on the other hand, was demonized as a hothead – and shortly afterwards a drug user when a post-mortem toxicology report didn’t just find THC in Ward’s system, but enough to impair his judgment according to Ontario county district attorney Michael Tantillo. Something about that picture always seemed off. Now a recent documentary shows just how far off, down to the pixel.
