Where There's Smoke...

Stewart looks at the screen, and another car's time pops up.

"There's the dickhead," he says to no one in particular.

Onscreen, Kurt Busch just ran his qualifying lap in his No. 2 Miller Lite Dodge. At the start of the season, Busch (the older brother of Kyle) got into a skirmish with Stewart during practice before the Daytona 500. Afterward, Busch and Stewart were called to the NASCAR official's hauler to iron things out, and while both decline to discuss what happened, rumor has it Stewart decked Busch with a punch to the face.

"You know those kids in high school that talk all the time and won't shut up?" Stewart says. "And every once in a while someone gives them a good wailing? That's Kurt."

Fighting, of course, is part of the Stewart charm. His first on-track altercation in the Cup series took place in his rookie year at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia. Racing against a field that included Dale Earnhardt Sr., Stewart mixed it up with Kenny Irwin.

"We were rivals from open-wheel racing," Stewart says. "We knew if we were at the same racetrack, we'd have to beat each other to win, and we just got in a shoving match in race cars. Every time one of us would hit the other, it was harder than the one before. Eventually Kenny crashed me bad enough to where I couldn't get it to move."

When that happened, Stewart's No. 20 car came to a smoldering stop across the center of the corner. He got out and stood angrily on the track waiting for Irwin's car to pass under caution. The crowd erupted: The balls on this rookie!

"I reached in his car and tried to grab hold of him," says Stewart. "Wasn't a very smart thing to do. The funny thing is, Dale Earnhardt was in front of Kenny's car, and Earnhardt slows down to a crawl to give me time to get to Kenny. So the old man was working with me there." Irwin was killed the next year during a practice run in New Hampshire.

Over the next eight years, Stewart would accrue a racing rap sheet longer than that of any active driver. He once chased Matt Kenseth into the infield at Daytona, and he tried to climb into Brian Vickers' car, à la Irwin, after tangling with him on the track. The list of fellow drivers he's had on-track altercations with includes Jeff Gordon, Clint Bowyer, David Gilliland, Ryan Newman and Rusty Wallace, who said he wanted to "wring Stewart's neck."

"Sometimes I just want to shake some damn sense into him," says Carl Edwards, who after getting wrecked by one of Stewart's on-track tantrums wondered to a TV reporter how "that much of a jerk" could have gotten this far in life. "But Tony's a good guy. I would say that if he got in shape he'd win even more races, but I don't think Tony needs to do that to win."

"I like to think I do things the right way," Stewart says. "It's about respect. You get into a wreck with somebody you might hold a grudge for three or four weeks, but it goes away. There's a lot of water under the bridge."