Where There's Smoke...

Not everyone enjoys Stewart's act, however. Racing blogs burble with invective — "a big orange truckload of crybaby," "fat, arrogant punk-ass," "the biggest douche bag in sports." Before each race, when drivers ride around the track on the backs of pickup trucks and wave at the crowds, none are greeted with so thick a barrage of hate as Stewart. Partly because he can be a jerk. But also because he wins. A lot. Stewart is one of only three full-time drivers in NASCAR today with multiple championships. But 2008 has been a tough season — a "nightmare," he calls it — riddled with crashes, mechanical failures and bad-luck endings. He's not even the top racer on his team this season — he's been surpassed by Kyle Busch, who is currently enjoying a Tiger Woods-like run of dominance in NASCAR.

Recently, Stewart dropped a bombshell when he announced he was leaving his employer, the deep-pocketed Joe Gibbs Racing, to start his own team in 2009. Haas CNC Racing, a much smaller outfit that has never won a race and whose principal owner, Gene Haas, is serving two years in prison for tax fraud, offered Stewart a free 50 percent stake in its $41 million organization. After weeks of hand-wringing, Stewart accepted.

The new team is called Stewart-Haas Racing, and it's the biggest move of Stewart's career. But it's risky. Stewart will no longer have the well-regarded Zipadelli in his ear or the Home Depot logo decorating everything in his sightline. And the recent history of owner-driver experiments is dodgy at best. Michael Waltrip, the two-time Daytona 500 winner, debuted his eponymous racing team full-time in 2007, but its three drivers are still winless, and they struggle every week to break the top 20.

Stewart is undaunted. "Running a Cup team is a big step for me," he says. "But not too big. I mean, I worked my way up the ladder. Plus I already own a couple of race teams. I got an edge."

Of course, the switch raises a delicious question. In the past, when Stewart had one of his famous meltdowns, there was always a staffer or executive happy to humor him, absorb the anger and pick up the pieces for one of the sport's great racers. But now that Stewart is the boss, who will he bitch to?

Flying home on the plane from Phoenix, Stewart finishes a couple of slices of pizza, opens his laptop and plays computer mah-jongg as Led Zeppelin blasts through his headphones. Despite having raced hundreds of hard miles, he doesn't sleep on the plane. By the time we land in Indiana, he's relaxed and has become affable and chatty.

A beat-up Hummer H2 — one of Stewart's 50-plus car collection — is parked beside the tarmac at the Columbus Municipal Airport. Its windshield is cracked, and fast-food wrappers litter the floor. Stewart doesn't wear a seat belt as he drives slowly from the outskirts of town to his sleepy suburban neighborhood and pulls into the driveway of his house — the same modest, low-slung, three-bedroom home he grew up in.

Stewart turns off the big V-8 and sits for a moment in the early-morning stillness. He exhales heavily.

"Getting home at dawn's pretty depressing," he says. "But it's good to be here, ain't it?"