This week:  Another top Sprint Cup driver looking for his first Vegas win, Stewart has four top-five finishes and six top-10s in nine starts there. He finished second in 2000, third in 2004 and had back-to-back fifth-place finishes in 2002 and 2003.

Last week: Stewart had quite a day at Fontana on Monday — a seventh-place finish in the Cup race followed by a victory in the Nationwide Series race. “It wasn’t a big deal — that was easy,” Stewart said of running two races back-to-back. “These cars (Nationwide) drove so much better than the ones we drove this morning — it was a lot more fun to drive these, obviously, because they handle so good compared to the Sprint Cup cars. We need a little work right now, in all honesty (on the Toyota engines in the Cup cars). They had some problems earlier in the week, and so they tamed them down for this week to make sure they would live and they did. I would rather make it live than take a chance on it being fast and not making it to the end here. That’s part of the learning curve and part of the growing pains when you change like this — trying to find what you have to do, and some days you’re not going to have it perfect. We’ll get it there — it’s just going to take a couple weeks.”

Etc.:  Stewart clinched the 1997 Indy Racing League championship at Las Vegas Motor Speedway when he was competing for Team Menard. One year earlier, Stewart suffered the most serious injury of his career when he had a broken pelvis in a turn 2 crash at LVMS in the IRL race — the first-ever event at the track.

Hookscenter.com wire report.