Stewart-Montoya tiff leaves behind trail of wreckage (cont'd)

"I'm going to race people how they race me. When you do something like that and try to get me in a bad spot on a restart, if you're racing that hard in the beginning then why shouldn't I race him hard?

"I've got the same right to do the same thing but he took us out."

Notes: Ten speeds

Chip Ganassi got his money's worth from Juan Montoya on Sunday at Texas. And from David Stremme, too, as both drivers posted top-10 finishes.

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Montoya, who finished eighth for his second career top-10 finish, said he tries to give all his competitors respect, but he had no intention of just moving over.

"I don't think Chip [Ganassi] hired me to run 20th every weekend, and I didn't come here to run 20th every weekend," Montoya said. "Is [contact] going to happen? Yeah, it's going to happen a lot of weekends, but our aim is to run up front.

"I think anybody that's seen me race knows that I'm not going to back down. I respect everybody. Anybody who has a run at me I'll give them enough room to race, but [the wreck with Stewart was] just racing."

Stewart, who persevered to finish 25th, two laps down, softened a little, within moments of his first tirade, but ended by saying it would take Montoya a while to get back in his good graces.

"Honestly, I don't blame him [because] you can't expect him to learn everything in four or five weeks," Stewart said. "He's got more talent than anybody's ever had over there on that team and he's got the best shot to do good on that team right now with the exception of David Stremme.

"Stremme's got a good shot, too. Maybe Ganassi doesn't pay [Montoya] to run in the back but you might want to be just a little bit more patient, just long enough to learn everything and how everything's done over here.

"He didn't make friends with me [Sunday] so he won't get any help from me in the future."

The side-to-side contact caused Stewart to spin into Turn 4 and collect Jimmie Johnson, who had fallen back from second about a dozen laps earlier when his No. 48 Chevrolet's engine started to lie down.

"I expected [Stewart] to spin out of the way, I didn't expect him to stay in the way," Johnson said. "At this point I am just trying to stay out of the way and not get rear-ended. Unfortunately I ran right into Tony.

"I couldn't see through the smoke. Tony had a lazy spin on the inside and I knew he wasn't going to get on the apron. I figured he'd come back across the track so I went as low as I could.

"I could see [Johnny Sauter] coming hard behind me in my mirror. I tried to keep moving so he wouldn't rear-end me but unfortunately [Stewart] didn't slide up out of the way."

The mishap epitomized Stewart's frustration with his car's handling, which he overcame to the tune of being listed in the top 10 at nine of the 12 checkpoints before the fateful incident on Lap 239.

"I don't know if we had a winning car but we had a solid top-10 car, no problem," Stewart said. "It was a totally different racecar than [Saturday], obviously."

The accident with Stewart was the coup de gras for the defending Nextel Cup champion Johnson, who had never won at Texas but was listed in the top three at all 12 marks before the accident.

The only reason Johnson couldn't be considered a potential winner was his Hendrick Motorsports team's engine problem that, given his team's history of coming back, wasn't a definitive death sentence until Stewart did his whirlybird imitation. (Continued)