KNOW WHEN TO HOLD 'EM; KURT BUSCH WINS A RAIN-SHORTENED NEW HAMPSHIRE RACE.

Byline: AL PEARCE

Tony Stewart might very well win his third Sprint Cup this year. He will almost certainly qualify for the Chase for the Champion-ship, and all bets are off when he does. After all, if bad luck is balanced eventually by good, Stewart will cakewalk his way to the title.

By almost any measure, the 2002 and 2005 champion has suffered an inordinate batch of misfortune. He crashed out to finish last at Las Vegas. He wrecked late at Talladega after leading much of the race. He and Elliott Sadler wrecked early at Darlington, then again at Dover. A late-race flat tire cost him an easy win at Lowe's Motor Speedway. A speeding penalty got him at Pocono, and Kevin Harvick got him at Sonoma.

Then came New Hampshire Motor Speedway, where Stewart led 132 laps and finished 13th because rain turned the Lenox Industrial Tools 301 into the 284 moments after his last pit stop. Given time, he likely would have made it back into the top five and perhaps even have won. But the weather forced officials to call the race 17 laps short, leaving a thoroughly unlikely top five of Kurt Busch, Michael Waltrip, J.J. Yeley, Martin Truex Jr. and Sadler.

"This is the worst string of bad luck we've ever seen,'' Stewart said after his 10th finish outside the top 10 this year, including eight in his last 10 starts. "And there's nothing we can do about it. There's a percentage of racing that's called luck, and you can't change it. All you can do is work hard and crawl away from 28th [on the grid] and get the lead. It's one of those years where everything that can go wrong goes wrong.''

Stewart needed 75 laps to move from 28th into the top 15. He needed only a few more to reach the top 10 and a handful more to reach the top five. He led laps 141 to 205, dropped back briefly while pit stops cycled, then led from 208 until taking fuel under caution on 274. That's when the racing gods conspired against him again.

First, eight drivers who had been eating his dust stayed out and inherited ...