Sunday Monkey

You already knew that Tony Stewart, the feudin', cussin' two-time Nextel Cup champ, had an animal side--he recently flipped the bird at a fellow driver while travelling 200 miles an hour--but he also has an animal side. His pets include an iguana, a tiger named Tangie (who lives at the Metrolina zoo near Charlotte) and the darling of his menagerie, Mojo, a three-year-old diaper-wearing patas monkey that Stewart and former girlfriend Krista Dwyer got as a gift from a zoo in Rockwell, N.C., last year. "A baby monkey doesn't take long to start jumping from object to object," Stewart says of Mojo, a male who weighs 20 pounds and can run 35 miles an hour for short stretches. "It's like having a child on crack."

Mojo (above, last year) eats a lot of sliced apples and pears and baby marshmallows. Although Stewart (below) and Dwyer have split, leaving Mojo as the monkey in the middle, Stewart visits him at Dwyer's Charlotte home once a week; he often has Mojo clambering on him at the track on days leading up to a race and for holidays brings him to his house in Columbus, Ind. "He's so smart he figured out how to defeat the child locks," says Stewart. Mojo also tracks Stewart on TV. Watching last November's Homestead race, Mojo was so amped to see his master's face, he leaped at him, sending a 42-inch plasma TV crashing to the floor. The little guy wasn't scolded much for the Stewartesque outburst. After all: Monkey see, monkey do.