Hewitt is the son of Sprint Car legend Don Hewitt, and grew up immersed in open-wheel dirt track culture. He began his sprint car racing career in 1975 at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, recording three wins in his very first season of competition.
In the All Star Circuit of Champions, Hewitt won the series title in 1985. His 56 career wins in the series rank him in the top five all-time. He followed that with back-to-back USAC Silver Crown Series championships in 1986 and 1987, accumulating 23 Silver Crown wins — second only on the all-time list. Across the USAC National Sprint Car series he recorded 46 career wins, placing him fourth all-time.
On September 26, 1998, Hewitt accomplished a feat that had never been done before and has not been repeated since. At the 4-Crown Nationals at Eldora Speedway, he won all four feature races on the same night: the USAC Sprint, USAC Midget, USAC Silver Crown, and UMP Modified. The performance remains one of the most remarkable single-night achievements in American dirt track racing history.
In 1998 Hewitt competed in the Indianapolis 500, finishing twelfth. The venture into Indy car racing represented a detour from his natural habitat on the dirt tracks, but it demonstrated the breadth of his open-wheel skills. After his IndyCar experience, Hewitt returned to sprint cars until a very serious crash in 2002, from which he was fortunate to escape with his life and which effectively ended his driving career.
Hewitt made multiple trips to Australia over the course of his career. During the late 1970s and early 1980s he raced as part of four-man USA sedan teams at the Liverpool Speedway and Newcastle Motordrome, sometimes also driving Sprintcars. He won the 1980 Marlboro Grand National 100-lap event at Liverpool. Later in the decade he returned to Australia as a Sprintcar competitor, winning the Grand Annual Sprintcar Classic at the Premier Speedway in Victoria in 1991, defeating fellow American Danny Smith and leading Australian driver Max Dumesney.
Hewitt was inducted into the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame in 2002, acknowledging a career built on consistency, versatility, and outright speed across dirt ovals. He is commemorated by the Jack Hewitt Classic, an annual race held at Waynesfield Raceway Park in Waynesfield, Ohio, which has also been staged in past years at Kokomo Speedway and Attica Raceway Park. His family lineage, combined with his extraordinary record across multiple series and international venues, makes him one of the defining figures of American dirt track racing in the 1980s and 1990s.
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