Late gamble pays off for Stewart

The crew climbed the fence, but the boss didn’t.

Tony Stewart did that when he won races as just a driver, but perhaps such larks are of days gone by for Stewart the team owner.

With a daring pass with two laps to go, Stewart won Saturday night’s All-Star Race at Concord, N.C., with his co-owner Gene Haas watching, back for his first race since late 2007 after serving a 16-month sentence for federal tax fraud. It was Stewart’s first win in the All-Star Race and only the second time an owner-driver has won the event.

“The gamble was for Gene Haas, he’s there with us tonight,” Stewart said. “Man, I tell you, he’s not going to miss a week now. He gets here and we win the race.”

Matt Kenseth finished second and Kurt Busch finished third.

On NASCAR’s second attempt to start the race’s final segment, a 10-lap shootout, Kyle Busch squeezed precariously between Jeff Gordon and Kenseth, and pushed himself from fourth to first on the restart.

But it didn’t end there. Gordon wasn’t about to give way to Kyle Busch. He stayed inside and challenged aggressively. Before Gordon knew what happened, he was three-wide with Busch next to him and Ryan Newman on the outside wall.

Gordon and Kyle Busch made contact, and the contact sent Gordon swerving across the track. His car caught fire and crashed into the wall, releasing fluid all over the track.

“That’s the All-Star event,” Gordon said, after being evaluated and released from the infield care center. “That’s just a bunch of guys racing really, really hard. I heard ‘three-wide’ at the last second.

“I got a bad restart and Kyle obviously got one heck of a restart. I don’t know where he came from. . . . Thankfully nobody got into me. It was a great night for us up until that point.”

That caused a caution with eight laps to go, but it wasn’t the race’s last caution.

With five laps to go a debris caution bunched up the field and opened the door for Stewart to make his move. It might have been the most meaningful win of Stewart’s career, given all he has put into this team’s success.

Stewart left Joe Gibbs Racing at the end of last season after 10 years and two championships with the organization.

He became a part-owner of Haas/CNC, operated the team with Hendrick Engines, and took on the difficult task of turning a team that struggled to stay in the top 35 last year into a championship contender. That wasn’t Stewart’s stated goal, but the rest of his team knew that’s what was expected of them.

It didn’t take long.

Stewart is second in points standings and his teammate/employee Ryan Newman is eighth.

Week after week, though, wins seemed just out of his reach.

Not this week.

-- Tania Ganguli

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Indy qualifying

Robert Doornbos shook off two crashes in practice last week and led the third of four rounds of time trials for the Indianapolis 500 as the final 11 spots in the 33-car field were tentatively filled. He had a four-lap average of 221.692 mph to grab the 23rd position in the lineup.

While the field is now filled, it is not final. The slowest drivers can be bumped out by faster qualifiers today, the last day of time trials.

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Irwindale

Scott Dodd of Mira Loma took over the lead from Rip Michels on the 46th lap and went on to win the NASCAR ACDelco Super Late Model 50-lap feature race at Toyota Speedway in Irwindale.