Newman Holds Off Gordon

Victory eased the pain Ryan Newman felt after muscling a 3,400-pound stock car around the track for half of Sunday afternoon.

Newman lost his power steering, but not his determination, and held off Jeff Gordon to win the MBNA 400 at Dover International Speedway in Dover, Del.

“I’m definitely tired,” Newman said. “My arms hurt, my back hurts, my neck hurts, and I’ll be really sore tomorrow and probably Tuesday. But we had a fast race car, and I wasn’t about to pull into the garage and say, ‘That’s it, guys.’ ”

The victory gave Newman what he hopes will be the momentum to move into contention in the Winston Cup points race.

“I lost the power steering with about 180 laps to go and that made it really hard,” he said. “I couldn’t even scrub my tires like the rest on the cautions because of it.”

But the burly driver had enough strength to keep Gordon behind him when the four-time series champion tried to dive underneath in Turn 1 after the green flag waved for the final time with six laps to go.

“He raced me clean and I appreciate that,” Newman said. “He could have tapped me and got me loose. I was proud to race with him.”

Said Gordon: “Ryan’s very smooth and runs a good line. He deserves to be in victory lane today.”

But Gordon and third-place finisher Bobby Labonte thought Tony Stewart would have won had it not been for a one-lap penalty from NASCAR for pitting slightly out of the box.

“Tony was by far the class of the field,” Gordon said.

Newman didn’t think that was necessarily so.

“It’s just too hypothetical to say,” he explained. “If we had power steering the whole race, I might have lapped the field.”

Stewart, easily the fastest car in the field, recovered to finish fourth.

Stewart had no comment after the race, but crew chief Greg Zipadelli thought the sanctioning body was nitpicking.

“We weren’t over the line, we were on the line by an inch,” he said. “What are you going to do? A rule’s a rule.”

The winner’s average speed was 106.896 in a race slowed nine times by caution for 68 laps.

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Juan Pablo Montoya won the Monaco Grand Prix, ending Michael Schumacher’s three-race winning streak in Formula One.

Montoya held off Kimi Raikkonen in the final laps on the twisting street course in the Mediterranean principality of Monte Carlo, Monaco, for the second victory of his career. His other came at the Italian Grand Prix in 2001.

Raikkonen, in a McLaren-Mercedes, was second, 0.6 of a second behind at the finish of the 78-lap, 2.08-mile course. Raikkonen extended his standings lead over Schumacher, 48 points to 44.

Schumacher, in a Ferrari, was third, 1.7 seconds behind Montoya.

The Canadian Grand Prix is in two weeks in Montreal.

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Tony Schumacher got his first victory of the season and the eighth of his career in the top-fuel division of the NHRA Route 66 Nationals at Joliet, Ill.

Schumacher drove his dragster down the quarter-mile track in 4.530 seconds at 321.50 mph to hold off defending champion Larry Dixon, who posted a run of 4.615 at 321.42.

Whit Bazemore won the funny-car division, and Kurt Johnson and Angelle Savoie won their respective categories.

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Shelby Howard, 17, won the ARCA BPU 200 at Kansas City, Kan., and became the youngest ARCA driver to win on a superspeedway.