It took a total team effort, but Tony Stewart now has a points paying victory in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series as an owner/driver.

Starting from the rear of the field after wrecking his primary car in practice, Stewart quickly worked his way through the pack during the early stages of the race. Hitting pit road for the final round of yellow flag stops on Lap 159, Stewart’s No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice crew got the job done and sent him off pit road with the lead. Getting the job done behind the wheel, Stewart did everything he could to conserve fuel allowing him to get to coast across the finish line first.

Stewart obviously had more fuel left in the tank than anyone thought, because he put on one heck of a show smoking the tires celebrating the win.

"It is [more special to win as an owner/driver] because of the group of guys I’m working with,” Stewart said from Victory Lane. “I’ve always had a great group of people to work with at Joe Gibbs, but it’s just a little different when it’s your own, when you’re the one at the end of the day that’s got to be accountable for it.”

Taking the win, Stewart became the first owner/driver to win a points paying event since Ricky Rudd in Martinsville in 1998. The driver of the No. 14 also extended his points lead over Jeff Gordon to seventy-one points.

Carl Edwards had the dominant car of the afternoon, but was in conservation mode during the final stages of the race. After losing the race off pit road to Stewart, Edwards was never able to do anything with the No. 14 ahead of him and was hoping he would run out of gas before the end.

“I didn’t think Tony could save that much fuel, but he did a great job,” Edwards said after the race. “Would really like to be out there with the trophy, but a good day for points.”

The driver of the No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion led six times for a race-high 103 of 200 laps.

"I'll probably be happy later today but right now, man, to be that close to victory and to not win, that is frustrating," Edwards added.

Thanks to another good call by crew chief Rodney Childers and great fuel mileage, David Reutimann was able to come home third. With the top-5 finish, Reutimann jumped up into the top-12 in points, leaving Pocono in eleventh.

Jeff Gordon fought an ill-handling car for much of the afternoon and came back to score a fourth-place finish. The driver of the No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet stayed on the track when the leaders hit pit road under caution on Lap 159. Gambling on fuel mileage and hoping for rain, neither panned out and the four-time champion brought his car to pit road on Lap 163. As the leaders began to hit pit road for fuel late in the race, Gordon appeared to be in the cat-bird seat.

Ryan Newman overcame a cracked spark plug in the mid-section of the race to score a top-5 finish. The driver of the No. 39 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet noticed a problem just eighty laps into the 200-lap event. The engine under the hood began missing and alternating between seven and eight cylinders. Newman got his break when the caution flew on Lap 105 for debris. The crew quickly went to work diagnosing and fixing the problem, sending their driver back out on the track. From there, Newman went to work on the track passing cars and regaining the lost spots.

With one lap to go before the race restarted on Lap 165, Newman led the charge of seven cars to pit road to top off on fuel. As others made their way to pit road for gas late in the race, Newman was able to take advantage of the call and score the top-5 finish.

The Roush Fenway Racing cars of Matt Kenseth and Greg Biffle were strong all day, but thanks to poor fuel mileage neither were able to finish where they wanted. The driver of the No. 16 chased teammate Carl Edwards from the second-spot much of the day, only to come home eleventh after pitting on Lap 185.

“We had a great car, but when we don’t need to have good fuel mileage, we’ve got good fuel mileage, and when we need it, we don’t,” Biffle pointed out. “And that’s what it came down to today: fuel mileage.”

Kenseth ran in the top-four for much of the event, but was forced to hit pit road with just three laps to go.  The disappointed driver of the No. 17 DeWalt Ford was forced to swallow a sixteenth-place finish.

“We ran third all day and finished 16th. I don’t know what else to say about it,” Kenseth said after the event.

Another front-runner bit by fuel mileage was Hendrick Motorsports’ Jimmie Johnson. Leading twice for a total of 31 laps, Johnson had one of the strongest cars in the field throughout the event. Racing with Edwards for the second-spot with just one lap to go, the No. 48 slowed coming out of the tunnel turn and coasted across the finish line out of fuel in the seventh-spot.

Sunday’s Pocono 500 was slowed by five cautions for a total of twenty laps, but none of them for on-track incidents. The new double-file restart procedure seemed to go off without a hitch, but was not really put to the test on the massive 2.5-mile track.

Next week the stars of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series head to the Irish Hills of Michigan for the LifeLock 400.

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