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Tony Stewart was in a jocular mood after Sunday's victory at Pocono, a little bristly, as usual, but jocular. After he finished his post-race remarks in the press room, a few reporters threw a few play questions at him as he walked out to do other media.
Would Tony like a chance to run in the Formula 1/NASCAR cameo Wednesday at Indianapolis, at which Juan Montoya and Jeff Gordon will swap cars in a long-awaited test?
"Is it open?" Stewart said. "If you had any pull at all, you'd have me in that deal.
"I'll tell you like I tell all the other F1 guys, you've got my phone number, you know how to get hold of me."
So you'd want to do it? "Hell yeah," Stewart said.
What do you think NASCAR would think about that? "Who cares?" Stewart responded.
Tony also had a moment of play on the last lap, when he bumped the pace car as the cars crossed the finish line under caution. Stewart said there was nothing to that, even regarding the costly pit penalty NASCAR handed Stewart last week at Dover.
"I think from the time I led my first Winston Cup race under caution, I've always made a point to touch the pace car," he said. "Buster [Auton] is a pretty good guy.
"I hadn't done it all day, and I thought, well, maybe if I don't do it I won't jinx myself. We did it at Dover and look what happened.
"I tried to get him loose. I tried to work him around, get him on the left rear and see if I could get him wiggling around a little bit. The guys called me on the radio and said, 'Be easy on the race car.' So I got busted."
ON TV, IT LOOKED LIKE Terry Labonte flat turned Jeff Green around on Lap 198, sending Green hard into the inside steel guardrail. Both Green and Labonte were having good runs, with Green seventh and Labonte eighth at the time of the wreck.
What you didn't see was that Green, according to Labonte, cut down right in front of him as if to block, and Labonte, who had a run going to pass Green, couldn't slow down.
"I had a heck of a run on him there, and he cut down to block me," Labonte said. "I tried to cut back to the right. I didn't want to let out of the gas, and I thought I had him cleared. I caught him on the back and around he went. I hate it. I just never meant to get into Jeff."
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Labonte, written off after last year, has bounced back the past few weeks with a streak of top-10 runs. Since Texas in April, he has completed all but four of the scheduled laps, and his seventh-place Sunday was his best of the year, except for fifth at freakish Talladega.
"We're getting there," he said. "We're just a lot better than we were a year ago. We've been pretty strong every stop except the first two or three races."
YOU CAN'T HURT KEN SCHRADER, knock wood. He's taken some violent hits over the years, but other than his wife with a frying pan and his finger in an alternator belt, he never seems to suffer damage.
His crash on Lap 8 Sunday at Pocono looked pretty bad. He lost brakes at the end of the front straight (the longest in NASCAR), so he deliberately looped the car so as to back into the first-turn wall.
The car hit, climbed the wall, and flipped completely over, landing on its wheels, then burst into flame from the ruptured fuel tank. Without undue alarm or haste, Schrader calmly climbed from the car and looked over the damage as the fire crew arrived.
Schrader's take? "The back end is so soft on these things, and NASCAR has done a good job with all the safety stuff," he said. "It was kind of a puppy hit." If that's so, Kenny, we don't want to see the full-grown pit bull.
JACK ROUSH'S SPONSOR STRUGGLES perhaps are more apparent because he is trying to juggle so many. He lost the Navy sponsorship (on Jon Wood's Craftsman Truck) to FitzBradshaw, so both of his Trucks are running naked (although they nearly pulled off a one-two at Texas Saturday).
In Busch, Roush graduated Grainger to Winston Cup with Greg Biffle, but the Gain (Procter & Gamble) sponsorship for Jeff Burton went away, and he accepted Stanton Barrett's OdoBan/Bojangles deal to keep that program alive. Now it appears the OdoBan deal may be in jeopardy.
Roush Racing representative Stephanie Smith said the OdoBan deal was complicated, involving bank financing based on sales, or something like that. Yet, despite reports the deal was cooked, Smith said not to close the book just yet.
On the good news side, Roush now has re-signed a third of the four up-for-renewal Winston Cup deals (Pfizer/Viagra firming up last week), leaving only CITGO unconcluded.
