DOVER, Del. - Tony Stewart wedged his racecar into his pit box behind Jeff Gordon's Chevrolet and fumed as a NASCAR official blocked his exit.
Stewart's right front tire was judged to be over the pit-box line, and in the world of Winston Cup racing, that's against the law.
Stewart, whose No. 20 Chevrolet was the car to beat, lost a lap. Instead of emerging first, where he had been when he entered the pits on Lap 140, he left in 32nd position and a lap down.
The sky was an ugly gray and the wind was whipping, but the weather was nowhere near as angry as Stewart, who spent the rest of the afternoon trying to make up that difference in the MBNA Armed Forces Family 400.
When the race was finally decided over a final six-lap shootout, Ryan Newman wound up the winner, as he held off Gordon, Bobby Labonte and Stewart, who afterward emerged from his car and bolted to the privacy of his motor home without comment.
"To come back and have a chance to win after that penalty tells you he was the class of the field," Gordon said.
Newman, however, wouldn't acknowledge Stewart's superiority, as he overcame the loss of power steering in his No. 12 Dodge and averaged 106.896 mph for an 0.834-of-a-second victory to become the first driver since Richard Petty in 1975 to put a Dodge in Victory Lane at Dover International Speedway.
"I definitely knew he had a really fast racecar," Newman said, "but he screwed up in the pits. It wasn't a piece of tape coming off or a blown tire. It was his own screw-up, in my opinion."
And Newman didn't want to hear or entertain any speculation about what the results would have been had Stewart not been called for the infraction.
"A lot of guys had problems," Newman said. "We lost our power steering about 185 miles into the race. I could speculate that if we had had power steering, we could have lapped the field. But that's hearsay."
Yesterday was one of the most enthralling races ever run at the one-mile, high-banked oval. Stewart had been running away from the field, rolling up nearly a three-second lead before the devastating pit stop during a caution period in which all the leaders pitted.
Pit road at Dover is so tight that Gordon called it a safety hazard for the men who work on the cars and an unnecessary evil in this modern age of safety consciousness.
