Pole vaulting: no one has been better at the finish this season than Ryan Newman, who has the most Winston Cup victories, but he and his team make their best moves at the start--in qualifying.(NASCAR)

One reason Ryan Newman is winning so many races is his engines get great fuel mileage without sacrificing horsepower. At that long-sought accomplishment his competitors marvel ... and accuse him of cheating. The accusations were loudest after Newman's win October 5 at Kansas Speedway in what Kevin Harvick labeled "a 15th-place car."

Along with several other drivers, Newman drove the final 117 miles on one tank, beating Bill Elliott to the finish line even though Elliott clearly had the stronger car all day. What made drivers, um, curious was that Newman drove those final 79 laps aggressively, then burned doughnuts on his way to victory lane. You're not supposed to be able to do that if you're running on fumes. Newman and crew chief Matt Borland denied any wrongdoing and described the accusations of cheating as the whining of drivers tired of being beaten. NASCAR has inspected Newman's cars many times and found nothing wrong, but that hasn't silenced the critics.

Newman's fellow drivers hope to catch him cheating because they haven't been able to catch him on the racetrack.

Forget Matt Kenseth--Newman has been more dominant this season in Winston Cup. Kenseth is the circuit's Atlanta Braves; he has managed to make an enormously impressive 23 top 10 finishes seem boring. But Newman has nearly as many top 10s and more top fives. Heading into the race at Atlanta, Newman had led more than twice as many laps as Kenseth, and Newman had eight wins; Kenseth had one. Newman has more wins and poles than any second-year driver in the history of NASCAR.

If Kenseth is the Braves of Winston Cup racing, Newman is the Greg Maddux. Like Maddux, Newman wins because he combines elite talent with uber-preparation and intelligence. Both rely on being calculating and precise. Take away the precision, and success is much harder to come by.

Kenseth has run away with the points race because the Winston Cup system favors consistency over winning, and Newman was terribly inconsistent at the beginning of the season.

Bad luck followed Newman, too, though at times he brought it on himself. In the Southern 500, he accidentally hit the kill switch, leaving him stalled on pit road as cars completed lap after lap. He probably would have won that race, in which he had been dominant, but instead finished 23rd, eight laps off the pace. At the Brickyard 400 in Newman's home state of Indiana, team engineer Mike Nelson calculated the team could turn 80 laps on a full tank of gas. Newman ran out on the way into the pits on Lap 81.