Stewart snags top-10 despite another penalty

FONTANA, Calif. -- NASCAR's speed limit has been the pits for Tony Stewart so far in 2007.

In two races, Stewart has been caught twice. However, the differences between his pit-road speeding penalty at Daytona and the one he received at California Speedway during Sunday's Auto Club 500 were like yellow and green.

During the Daytona 500, Stewart was caught leaving pit road too quickly after narrowly avoiding a collision between David Gilliland and Robby Gordon. But because it was under the yellow, Stewart was able to restart at the tail end of the field and work his way back to the lead before contact with Kurt Busch put his No. 20 Chevrolet hard into the Turn 4 wall.

On Sunday, Stewart was clocked by NASCAR at 60.2 mph at the entrance to pit road during green-flag pit stops on Lap 160. The penalty? Crawl back through the pit lane at a snail's pace while the rest of the field roared by.

Stewart told his crew over his radio that his tachometer read 300 rpm below the limit at the time of the infraction.

"Unless the line is in a spot that I don't know it's at ... I don't know," he said. "They've got the computer stuff and it tells you exactly when and where, so I'll be interested to see it."

By the time all of the stops were completed, Stewart was stranded in 17th position, 24 seconds behind eventual winner Matt Kenseth. And even though his car was as fast as anyone on the track for the rest of the day, including Kenseth, the yellow he needed to close back up on the leaders never materialized.

Still, Stewart picked off cars at will, moving up to 11th by Lap 205 and seventh when the red flag was displayed for David Reutimann's crash with a handful of laps remaining.

At that point, Stewart and crew chief Greg Zipadelli rolled the dice and decided to come in for fresh rubber.

"We had to do something," Stewart said. "We knew the guys behind us were going to take tires. We were kind of right in the middle of a cut-off point.

"We knew a certain amount of guys were going to take four and the rest of them were going to stay out that were a little further up there. So we just took the chance."

Restarting 12th, Stewart was able to get back to eighth when the checkered flag flew.

It salvaged what could have been a second consecutive horrible finish, but at the same time, masked the disappointment over what might have been. Still, it moved Stewart up 18 places in the standings -- to 21st, 149 points behind leader Mark Martin.