INDIANAPOLIS — True story: Sunday, Feb. 11, 2001, Daytona Int’l Speedway. The Budweiser Shootout is over and the afternoon shadows have grown long.

Tony Stewart, star of the day, has been all over the property since the Shootout ended. He’s been doused in beer, he’s done the usual victory lane thing — TV and radio interviews, endless poses — and he’s been bundled into an elevator and sent up to the press box for more interviews.

Now, in his motorhome, he sighs. The adrenaline is wearing off, but Stewart is grinning.

He says, “Want to go to Volusia?”

He’s talking about a sprint car race at Volusia Speedway Park, 25 miles away.

“Sure.”

He decides to grab a quick bite at Hooters — they’ve got a sandwich he loves — just across International Speedway Boulevard from DIS. The place is crowded, but there’s a corner table free. Stewart slips in mostly unnoticed and takes a seat facing the wall. Oldest trick in the celebrity book: If you can’t see them, they can’t see you. But soon the pointed fingers made it clear that word of his presence was getting around.

The food comes fast and we dig in.

One at a time, people drift over, asking for autographs. Stewart, who can get testy in these situations, remains calm, even polite. He repeats his awkward position: “I don’t want to be rude, but if I sign for you, I’ll end up signing for half the people here and we’re running late.”

Everyone smiles back and says they understand, even the fellow holding a Tony Stewart hat he’d like to have signed. He nods at Stewart’s quiet demurral, slips the hat back onto his head and disappears into the crowd.

We settle up with the waitress and exit through a side door. There, on a patio, the guy who’d had the Stewart hat blocks our path. As we were finishing our meals, he’d stepped outside, torn apart his hat and set the pieces on fire. The charred remains are on the patio deck. He is quite eager for Stewart to see this.

Bizarre. An hour earlier, this man had been a Stewart fan. He’d laid down $15 or $20 to buy the cap. He’d been at the Shootout, no doubt cheering as his driver picked Dale Earnhardt’s pocket with just over a lap to go.

Hell, he’d even met his hero. Yet here he was, revenge in his eyes, his hat ruined because he hadn’t gotten an autograph.

Later, on the midnight ride back from the sprint car race, that weird moment is all Stewart can talk about. The next day, he tells me that he couldn’t sleep; he kept seeing that guy and his hat.

What is it about autographs that make people crazy? Paul Newman, actor and late-blooming race driver, famously stopped signing them after a fan approached him in a restaurant men’s room, pen and paper in hand.

His close pal, writer A.E. Hotchner, said Newman hated the implied classism, the idea that the famous person was doing the commoner a grand favor simply by scrawling his signature.

“The majesty of the act was offensive to him,” said Hotchner.

The Stewart incident came to mind recently as I read a social-media post about Geoff Bodine and the four blazing modified seasons that shaped his destiny.

This was personal to me because I’d seen most of it. Rideless and broke, Bodine moved from New York to Massachusetts in 1975, pairing with a car owner named Dick Armstrong. Armstrong’s red Pintos were flashy — a jewelry manufacturer, he loved chrome — but they had seldom won.

Bodine changed all that. His driving talent was obvious and, though, barely 26, his head was brimming with chassis theory. He transformed Armstrong’s operation. From 1975-’78, the team won more than 125 features, 55 in ’78 alone. Their trail of trophies stretched from New Hampshire to Florida.

On race nights, Bodine was all-business; forever measuring this, adjusting that. Small talk was for people who were satisfied with second. He was a hard man to get close to — at least back then. But he gave the Northeast some wonderful days and nights.

Yet there it was, in the middle of this long social-media thread, one aggrieved fan recalling the night he’d seen Bodine “blow off” some autograph seekers at Connecticut’s Stafford Motor Speedway.

Sure, the story lacked context. Had Bodine won the feature? Had he finished a heartbreaking second? Had he crashed? But forget the context and think about this: Bodine moved south after that ’78 season, so this fan’s venom — over autographs — had been fermenting for at least 42 years. Divorced couples let go of their rage in far less time.

I’ve known drivers who were glad to sign autographs until the last fan was gone. I’ve known others who never got comfortable with the process. Racing is a sport not of machinery, but of humans, and humans come in many forms.

Let’s close with a smile: Though Paul Newman disliked autographs, he took pains to put at ease those who came looking for them. Once, in an airport, a man sidled over and mentioned to the actor that his mom was a big fan.

“Tell your mom that I don’t sign autographs,” Newman responded. “But I’d be happy to buy her a beer.”