All those guys saying that he had to gun the engine to steer the car are full of crap. Throttle steering only applies when the car is near the limit (and sliding in the case of sprint cars).
After everyone had slowed down for the caution, the cars would steer as normal and there would be no need for throttle to steer the car.
Someone who claims to race these cars said that hitting the throttle at caution speeds will cause the tail to swing toward the inside of the track, and that’s exactly what the video shows.
>> Throttle steering only applies when the car is near the limit
I gather you’ve never spun a standing vehicle.
You’re being awfully presumptuous, and appear to be biased against Stewart. You have absolutely no idea as to Stewart’s mental state during the incident, or during the moments immediately before the incident. Obviously he was not moving at an all-out race speed, but certainly even the general rate of speed during the caution was still fast enough that had a driver been distracted for even a brief moment (by a noise, another approaching car/driver, a flashing light, a track worker, or a audience member etc), this could have easily caused him to not notice that Ward was out of his car and actually physically out on the track until a fraction of a second before he came up on him. Under such a last-instance circumstance, given the nature of sprint cars being in a perpetual turn, the act of turning the steering wheel alone may very well have caused the ass end to spin out anyway, even without getting on the throttle. After all, as a result of the engine’s compression, suddenly letting off the throttle can result in a breaking effect, also causing the ass end of a car to spin out during a turn. In such a scenario, since the car would now be in the process of turning away from Ward, hitting the throttle would have been exactly the right thing to do, and perhaps Tony’s only chance of avoiding Ward. This an extremely reasonable scenario had Tony not noticed Ward out on the track until the last second, and is far more likely than notion that Tony hit, and/or killed him intentionally. That kind of thinking is actually rather absurd.