GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Tony Stewart walked into the interview room a little late and quickly blamed his wife.
“Her fault,” he quipped.
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NHRA driver Tony Stewart gets ready for a qualifying run at the Gatornationals, Saturday, March 7, 2026, in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Long)
FILE - Leah Pruett and her husband Tony Stewart speak during a news conference, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)
NHRA driver Leah Pruett watches as her husband, fellow racer Tony Stewart, gets pushed onto the starting line at the Gatornationals, Saturday, March 7, 2026, in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Long)
NHRA driver Tony Stewart awaits a qualifying run at the Gatornationals, Saturday, March 7, 2026, in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Long)
Stewart flashed the same kind of reaction time that made him a top contender in NHRA last year, just his third full-time season in drag racing.
The three-time NASCAR champion and 1997 IndyCar champ won the NHRA’s regular-season title in the Top Fuel class while filling in for wife Leah Pruett at Tony Stewart Racing. Pruett stepped away for two years while they began a family; she gave birth to son Dom in November 2024.
Now Pruett is back, reclaiming the seat Stewart kept warm for consecutive seasons. Stewart, though, liked being behind the wheel so much that he is now driving for a competitor, Elite Motorsports, setting the stage for a husband-wife showdown on any given race weekend.
“I’m excited to see what these two do back and forth this year, whether they stay married or not,” said Matt Hagan, who drives for TSR in the Funny Car class. “It’s going to be interesting. … I’m just going to get my popcorn."
The show begins at the season-opening Gatornationals, where Pruett and Stewart could wind up in opposite lanes during bracket-style eliminations Sunday. It’s also possible — highly unlikely — they could go the entire year and not get paired against each other.
“I don’t care if it’s her or anybody else, I want to put my foot on their throat ’til their face turns blue and beat them to the other end,” Stewart said Friday. “And that’s what our job is. That’s what she wants to do if we have to race against each other.”
After two rounds of qualifying Friday, Pruett was penciled in as the No. 3 seed in the 16-car field, with Stewart at No. 5. They have two more qualifying runs Saturday before the elimination bracket is set.
Stewart and Pruett, along with Dom, have spent nearly 40 days in Florida. They tested setups and logged countless passes at drag strips in Bradenton and Gainesville. They traveled to Daytona International Speedway so Stewart could enter his first NASCAR race since 2016; he crashed and finished next to last in the Truck Series opener. They returned to Daytona Beach last weekend for the start of Bike Week.
It was all part of the lead-up to Pruett’s much-anticipated return — and a budding in-house rivalry.
“It’s more renew than new,” said Pruett, who finished a career-best third in points in 2023. “This is like old hat to a degree. I have to remind myself of that. My brain wants to absorb all of what is new and everything that we’re feeling and seeing. But I need to have that mature, emotional mindset of, yes, it’s all new, but it’s just the same.
“So let’s just pick up where we’re at in 2023 and move on. And that’s the comfortable feeling that I have.”
Facing off against Stewart could be uncomfortable, at least the first time and for a few minutes leading into the race.
Stewart said they have talked about it so much during the offseason that they even briefly considered side-by-side practice runs to alleviate some of the anxiety.
But they opted to wait. Stewart now looks at the potential matchup as a win-win scenario, with either him or his car advancing.
His approach, though, remains unchanged.
“You guys can glamorize this all you want and waste everybody’s time. She’s another driver with another helmet on, with another fire suit and another race car in the opposite lane, no different than any other run,” he said. “And that’s the way she has to treat it. That’s the way I have to treat it.
“I hate to burst everybody’s bubble. Everybody wants to write this big, flowery, fluffy story. And I don’t give a (damn) about it. I’m going to go race. I don’t care if it’s her or anybody else. And it’s no disrespect to her. I love her to death. We’re going to race each other at some point. Whenever it happens, it happens. It’s going to be great for you guys. It doesn’t do anything for me personally.”
One thing Stewart made clear: no matter what happens on the track, it won’t affect their relationship.
“At the end of the year, no matter who wins or loses, we will still be married,” he said. “Not in pencil, put that in ink. That is set in stone, so nothing’s going to change there.”
AP auto racing: https://apnews.com/hub/auto-racing
NHRA driver Tony Stewart gets ready for a qualifying run at the Gatornationals, Saturday, March 7, 2026, in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Long)
FILE - Leah Pruett and her husband Tony Stewart speak during a news conference, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings, File)
NHRA driver Leah Pruett watches as her husband, fellow racer Tony Stewart, gets pushed onto the starting line at the Gatornationals, Saturday, March 7, 2026, in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Long)
NHRA driver Tony Stewart awaits a qualifying run at the Gatornationals, Saturday, March 7, 2026, in Gainesville, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Long)
DORAL, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump said Saturday that the United States and Latin American countries are banding together to combat violent cartels as his administration looks to demonstrate it remains committed to sharpening U.S. foreign policy focus on the Western Hemisphere even while dealing with five-alarm crises around the globe.
Trump encouraged regional leaders gathered at his Miami-area golf club to take military action against drug trafficking cartels and transnational gangs that he says pose an “unacceptable threat” to the hemisphere's national security.
“The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries," Trump said. “We have to use our military. You have to use your military.” Citing the U.S.-led coalition that confronted the Islamic State group in the Middle East, the Republican president said that ”we must now do the same thing to eradicate the cartels at home.”
The gathering, which the White House called the “Shield of the Americas” summit, came just two months after Trump ordered an audacious U.S. military operation to capture Venezuela's then-president, Nicolás Maduro, and whisk him and his wife to the United States to face drug conspiracy charges.
Looming even larger is Trump's decision to launch a war on Iran with Israel one week ago, a conflict that has left hundreds dead, convulsed global markets and unsettled the broader Middle East.
Trump's time with the Latin American leaders was limited: Afterward, he set out for Dover Air Force Base, Delaware, to be on hand for the dignified transfer of the six U.S. troops killed in a drone strike on a command center in Kuwait, one day after the U.S. and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran.
Trump called the American deaths a “very sad situation” and praised the fallen troops as “great heroes.”
With the summit, Trump aimed to turn attention to the Western Hemisphere, at least for a moment. He has pledged to reassert U.S. dominance in the region and push back on what he sees as years of Chinese economic encroachment in America's backyard.
Trump also said the U.S. will turn its attention to Cuba after the war with Iran and suggested his administration would cut a deal with Havana, underscoring Washington's increasingly aggressive stance against the island's communist leadership. "Great change will soon be coming to Cuba,” he said, adding that “they’re very much at the end of the line.”
Cuban officials have said on several occasions that they were open to dialogue with the U.S. as long as it was based on respect for Cuban sovereignty, but they have never confirmed that such talks were taking place.
The leaders of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago joined the Republican president at Trump National Doral Miami, a golf resort where he is also set to host the Group of 20 summit later this year.
The idea for a summit of like-minded conservatives from across the hemisphere emerged from the ashes of what was to be the 10th edition of the Summit of the Americas, which was scrapped during the U.S. military buildup off the coast of Venezuela last year.
Host Dominican Republic, pressured by the White House, had barred Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from attending the regional gathering. But after leftist leaders in Colombia and Mexico threatened to pull out in protest — and with no commitment from Trump to attend — the Dominican Republic's president, Luis Abinader, decided at the last minute to postpone the event, citing “deep differences” in the region.
The Shield of the Americas moniker was meant to speak to Trump’s vision for an “America First” foreign policy toward the region that leverages U.S. military and intelligence assets unseen across the area since the end of the Cold War.
To that end, Ecuador and the United States conducted military operations this week against organized crime groups in the South American country. Ecuadorian and U.S. security forces attacked a refuge belonging to the Colombian illegal armed group Comandos de la Frontera in the Ecuadorian Amazon on Friday, authorities reported.
This joint fight against drug traffickers "is only the beginning,” said Ecuador's president, Daniel Noboa.
Notably missing at the summit were the region’s two dominant powers — Brazil and Mexico — as well as Colombia, long the linchpin of U.S. anti-narcotics strategy in the region.
Trump grumbled that Mexico is the "epicenter of cartel violence" with drug kingpins “orchestrating much of the bloodshed and chaos in this hemisphere.”
“The cartels are running Mexico,' Trump said. ”We can’t have that. Too close to us. Too close to you."
Trump made no mention of his administration's insistence that countering Chinese influence in the hemisphere is a top priority for his second term.
His national security strategy promotes the “Trump Corollary” to the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, which had sought to ban European incursions in the Americas, by targeting Chinese infrastructure projects, military cooperation and investment in the region’s resource industries.
The first demonstration of the more muscular approach was Trump’s strong-arming of Panama to withdraw from China’s Belt and Road Initiative and review long-term port contracts held by a Hong Kong-based company amid U.S. threats to retake the Panama Canal.
More recently, the U.S. capture of Maduro and Trump’s pledge to “run” Venezuela threatens to disrupt oil shipments to China — the biggest buyer of Venezuelan crude before the raid — and bring into Washington’s orbit one of Beijing’s closest allies in the region. Trump is scheduled to travel to Beijing later this month to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
For many countries, China’s trade-focused diplomacy fills a critical financial void in a region with major development challenges ranging from poverty reduction to infrastructure bottlenecks. In contrast, Trump has been slashing foreign assistance to the region while rewarding countries lined up behind his crackdown on immigration — a policy widely unpopular across the hemisphere.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted the leaders for a working lunch after Trump left for the event in Delaware. The lunch gave Kristi Noem, whom Trump fired as homeland security secretary on Thursday, the chance to make her debut in her new role as a special envoy for the “Shield of the Americas.”
“We want our hemisphere to be safer, to be more sovereign, and to be more prosperous,” Noem told the leaders.
Durkin Richer reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Gabriela Molina in Quito, Ecuador, contributed to this report.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is seen before the Shield of the Americas Summit, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
President Donald Trump signs a proclamation committing to countering cartel criminal activity at the Shield of the Americas Summit, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
President Donald Trump arrives at the Shield of the Americas Summit, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
President Donald Trump speaks at the Shield of the Americas Summit, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
President Donald Trump speaks at the Shield of the Americas Summit, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)
President Donald Trump speaks at the Shield of the Americas Summit, Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Trump National Doral Miami in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
FILE - This image from video shows the Trump National Doral in Doral, Fla., June 2, 2017. (AP Photo/Alex Sanz, File)
President Donald Trump listens during a roundtable discussion on college sports in the East Room of the White House, Friday, March 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
President Donald Trump speaks with Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a roundtable discussion on college sports in the East Room of the White House, Friday, March 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
President Donald Trump speaks during a roundtable discussion on college sports in the East Room of the White House, Friday, March 6, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
