Stewart Climbs to Top Again

Tony Stewart climbed the fence in front of the grandstand in what has become his familiar victory celebration.

And a crowd of 100,000 at New Hampshire International Speedway in Loudon roared its approval Sunday as he grabbed the checkered flag and pumped his fist in the air, just as he did two weeks earlier after a victory at Daytona. He called himself fat then, and this time heaped on more self-deprecating humor.

“Trust me, I’ll be glad to be panting like a dog when I get up there,” he said. “It’s something they like, and I’ll keep doing it for them.”

Stewart said he needed a personal trainer.

“I’m still too old and too fat to be doing that stuff,” the 34-year-old driver said.

Stewart started 13th and won for the third time in four races, passing at will inside and outside in a dominant performance in the New England 300.

The win was his second on this track and 22nd of Stewart’s career. He also won in Sonoma, Calif., and Daytona, and has posted finishes of second and fifth in his last five starts.

Stewart passed Ryan Newman on the 51st lap. But Kurt Busch got by with 60 laps to go. Stewart reclaimed the lead after he and Kurt Busch banged twice five laps later.

The defining moment of the race came when Stewart moved from fourth to second on lap 68 by passing Rusty Wallace on the outside and cutting inside Kyle Busch only a few hundred feet later.

Stewart’s Joe Gibbs Racing Chevrolet led 232 of 300 laps and beat the Ford of Kurt Busch by 0.851 of a second. It was the eighth top-10 finish in the last 11 races for Stewart, third in the NASCAR Nextel Cup standings.

“Tony was just too strong today,” said Kurt Busch, who overcame a spinout on the 35th lap. “It’s good we had a car that could come back.”

Points leader Jimmie Johnson, twice a winner here in 2003, finished 13th. He leads fifth-place finisher Greg Biffle by 77 points in the series standings. Stewart is 85 points behind.

Series champion Kurt Busch moved from 10th to fifth in the points race.

Third in the $5.1-million race was Stewart’s teammate, Bobby Labonte. Next came the Chevy of Kyle Busch and Biffle’s Ford.

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Sebastien Bourdais came up with an unlikely win in the inaugural Grand Prix of Edmonton in Canada, and all it took was a mistake-free race on mistake-filled day.

The reigning Champ Car World Series champion came from a 10th-place start after crashing in qualifying Friday and won his first victory since the season opener in April at Long Beach.

Frenchman Bourdais was able to slice through heavy traffic on the fast, 1.973-mile, 14-turn circuit and move into contention, but it took mistakes by A.J. Allmendinger and his RuSport teammate Justin Wilson of England to give Bourdais a shot at the 12th victory of his career.

Oriol Servia, subbing for injured Bruno Junqueira, also avoided trouble and gave the Newman/Haas Racing team a 1-2 sweep, finishing 0.596 of a second, about 10 car lengths, behind his teammate.

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Ricky Carmichael overcame a crash in the first moto and won his 21st consecutive 250cc race in AMA Motorcross in New Berlin, N.Y.

Carmichael crashed in the first moto and finished second, but rebounded to win the second, extending his winning streak, which dates to July 2003. His 71-point lead over Kevin Windham is the largest midseason points lead in the history of the championship.

Windham, of Centreville, Miss., finished second on a Honda, and Australian Chad Reed was third on a Yamaha.

Broc Hepler, from Kittanning, Pa., won his first 125cc national.