A lot of people are starting to write off Tony Stewart as a championship contender this season. To be sure, there's plenty of evidence that he's out of the running in the Chase: trailing overall leader Jeff Gordon by 198 points, Stewart has just five races to make up ground on a driver who's got 24 top-10 finishes in 31 races this year. Time, clearly, is running out.

And yet ... and yet ... nobody in Cup racing responds better to adversity than Stewart. Witness how he ran off three quick wins in the wake of his fallout with teammate Denny Hamlin at Daytona last July; or the way he won three of the final 10 races last year after failing to qualify for the Chase. You incur Stewart's wrath at your peril.

Well, now somebody has. So far in the 2007 Chase Stewart has been victimized by both bad luck and bad decision making (as my colleague, Tom Bowles, pointed out earlier this week). The latest incident came on pit row last Saturday night when Paul Menard checked Stewart's exit from his pit box. The brush set off a chain of events that left the No. 20's right front fender caved in and knocked Stewart all the way from fifth-place down to 28th.

Stewart's response to the accident was classic. Cursing into his radio, he screamed about the ability of a non-Chase driver to ruin his run and hurt his chances for a championship. Stewart is nothing if not a straight shooter, and his comments basically echoed something he had been saying all week: "What I don't like about [the Chase] is you've got 31 other guys that can dictate who wins the championship and who doesn't. We're not racing those other guys for points, so why should they be dictating where we stand amongst each other?"

After the race, Stewart's crew chief, Greg Zipadelli, had some stern things to say about Menard and his team [see Pro Rasslin' Meter]. There can be little doubt now that Stewart is ticked off. Even better, he's got nothing to lose. It wouldn't surprise me to see him run the field into the ground at Martinsville, and then go on a run where he wins two or three of the next five races. If he does, the pressure will be squarely on Gordon to keep it close.

Remember the last time Stewart was chasing Gordon down? It was at Watkins Glen last August. In that race, Gordon pressed to hard for the victory and wound up spinning off of the track two lanes from a win. Things are a bit different now. Gordon has a big lead instead of a small one. But I think Stewart relishes his role as a pursuer. If he gets hot, the next five weeks could be very interesting.

Jimmie Johnson talks about what he expects from this weekend's Car of Tomorrow race:

"I think at Martinsville we'll put on a good show. It will be like what we saw in the spring. I don't think you're going to have the same concerns of a 'big one' [a big accident] on the short track. You certainly have spins and catch four or five cars but you can't clean out 15 cars. So I think everyone will be back to normal and racing hard there. With the bumpers and how tough these cars are, we might actually see a more intense and exciting Martinsville than what we had in the spring."

• 23: Top-10 finishes in 29 starts for Jeff Gordon at Martinsville, the most among active drivers

• 10: Top-10 finishes in 11 starts for Jimmie Johnson at Martinsville, including wins their last October and last April

• 125.5: Tony Stewart's driver rating at Martinsville, the best among active drivers

• 67.5: Clint Bowyer's driver rating at Martinsville.

There wasn't much fussin' and feudin' at Charlotte last week, but there were several run-ins that might boil over in the next few weeks. In particular, Tony Stewart's crew chief, Greg Zipadelli, had some stern words for Paul Menard's team after his pit-road brush with Stewart. "The blame is I don't think either one of them have any respect for each other," Zipadelli said of Menard and Stewart. "Getting into the 15, I don't know. I just know his crew was clapping when we were working on our car. That's kind of uncalled for and unprofessional. But, you know, I'm a believer in what goes around comes around. Someday he'll be good enough to be in that situation -- maybe, if he's lucky -- and that'll probably happen to him or he'll lose something because he didn't have respect or any give-and-take with other people. We can't control what others do and how they act. All we can do is control how we respond to situations."

We can only hope there is space in Dale Jr.'s moving van for his fans to move with him to the new location of Dale Jr. Blvd.

September 22, 1991: Veteran Driver Harry Gant -- at 51 years of age, the oldest man to win a Winston-Cup event -- wins his fourth straight race at Martinsville.