Stewart races to Stater Bros. 300 win

Tony Stewart led 137 of 150 laps and won the Stater Bros. 300 on Monday at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, giving him consecutive victories to open NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series.

His Toyota was followed by Kyle Busch to the finish line, giving the automaker a 1-2 finish.

Busch was the only driver to compete in all three races during the weekend. His performance gave him three top-five finishes for the second week in a row. He won the Craftsman Truck Series on Friday and finished fourth in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Auto Club 500 race that concluded Monday.

He has finished second in both Nationwide races, behind Stewart, his Cup teammate at Joe Gibbs Racing.

“Maybe I need to run for the championship,” joked Stewart, who is scheduled to run nine Nationwide races. Busch is scheduled to race 14 truck and 30 Nationwide events.

“I got two second places to the guy who won the first two races; what else are you going to do?” said Busch, who started 14th. “Tony was pretty much in a league of his own.”

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After drivers slogged through 87 laps Sunday and 163 laps Monday in the Cup race, reaction was mixed about the Car of Tomorrow’s competitive debut in a speedway race without restrictor plates.

The Auto Club 500, spread over two days in vastly different types of weather, produced a record 33 lead changes among a near-record 15 drivers.

“I was anticipating bigger drafts in the straightaways; we just didn’t quite see that,” said third-place finisher Jeff Gordon, a three-time winner at the two-mile Auto Club Speedway. “Track position on these big tracks is extremely important. Today’s a pretty good indication of what we got. I think you’ll see the same thing next week” in Las Vegas.

Winner Carl Edwards didn’t seem to have any problems.

“You could actually gain a little bit being behind someone,” Edwards said. “It didn’t stop you from being able to race with them.”

Southern California native and owner-driver Robby Gordon finished 18th but liked what he saw.

“Back where I was, from 12th to 23rd all day long, there were guys passing guys, there were guys going three wide, sliding all over the place. It was pretty cool,” he said. “I think it produced as good a race as the cars they had before, and as people learn to tune these things they’re only going to get better.”

The bottom line, said Juan Pablo Montoya, was that “it was a typical race car. You made a good change, you went forward. You made a bad change, you went backward.”

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Ryan Newman’s 10th-place finish wasn’t nearly the letdown it might have been after he won the series’ biggest race the previous week.

“It wasn’t better than a 10th-place car,” he said of his Roger Penske-owned Dodge.

The Daytona 500 winner started 13th on Sunday, and was in 10th place when the race was red-flagged after 87 laps.

“It could have been a lot worse,” Newman said. “We finished in the same spot and got to learn more about the race car.”

Montoya challenged for the top 10 much of the race, but he brushed the wall with about 40 laps to go and finished 20th, his best performance in four races here.

“I thought it was a really good weekend with a bad finish,” Montoya said. “I was pushing pretty hard to stay up there, and I made a mistake.”

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martin.henderson@latimes.com