At least once a week, in the sports department of any newspaper that runs the results of NASCAR races, the phone will ring:

“How come,” the caller will ask, “Tony Stewart made $140,528 for finishing 40th in the Coca-Cola 600, and Joe Nemechek only got $84,740 for finishing 11th? Don’t seem right to me.”

The truth is, figuring out who makes what, and why, in any given Winston Cup race is almost as simple as rocket science, once you master the formulas.

The reason Stewart made more than Nemechek in the Coca-Cola 600 is that both are being paid for what they earned in the race and for what they did in getting to it.

Just how the purses for Winston Cup races are figured is spelled out in detail on the entry form NASCAR sends each team in advance of every race. The actual “racing purse” for each race is different, as are the “television awards.” Some of the “qualifying and special awards” remain constant. And then, some places pay “lap money,” and some don’t.

“It is a little complicated, at times,” said Herb Branham, of NASCAR’s public relations department. “It’ll blow your mind. But it’s pretty interesting, actually, to see all the money coming from different directions.”

Branham is one of several people it takes after every race to collect the data and see that the money coming in goes to the right driver and team. There is a computer program that helps to simplify things but, as he said, sometimes it gets confusing.

Basically, the “Posted Awards” (the amount listed at the top of the entry blank) is broken into four groups. In the Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, for instance, the posted awards totaled $5,396,603.

Here’s how the money breaks down:

Purse

The purse is the prize money paid by the track. The amount is agreed upon by NASCAR and the race promoter in January during the negotiations for a sanctioning agreement. It is paid, in decreasing increments, for first through 43rd places in the race.

TV awards

The television networks that broadcast the races are paying $2.6 billion over five years. NASCAR gets 10 percent, the tracks 65 percent and the teams 25 percent of the total package, and the race winnings come from each track’s share.

Plan awards

“Plan” awards are where it gets interesting. The NASCAR Winston Cup Series Car/Champion Owner Program is broken into two parts. Plan 1 pays a set figure of $8,000 for each car owner. It is reserved for the top 30 finishers in car owner points from the previous season.

Plan 1C, open to car owners who are in the top 40 but not in Plan 1, pays car owners for their drivers’ finishing position in relation to the other owners in the plan, on a decreasing scale. It is sort of a race within a race.

The “Plan” money is separate from the Winner’s Circle program, which is set up for the 10 most prolific winners from the previous season, plus the first two race winners from the current season not already on the program.

At Lowe’s, Johnson, the highest-finishing Winner’s Circle driver in the Coca-Cola 600, got $11,400 from the Winner’s Circle plan.

Second-place finisher Matt Kenseth, who was the top race winner in 2002 (with five wins), received $12,200 — for finishing behind Johnson.

Qualifying and special awards

Qualifying and Special Awards are where the plot truly thickens, because, like “Plan” money, some qualify for some awards and some don’t.

Qualifying is relatively simple. At the Coca-Cola 600, the top 10 qualifiers received from $5,000 for the pole (Bud Pole Award) to $300 for the 10th-fastest car. But, pole winner Newman got a $35,000 bonus from Goody’s Headache Powders because the Coca-Cola 600 is one of the races that company chooses to put its money on.

“Special awards,” also called contingency awards, are sometimes paid, sometimes not.

For instance, Tony Stewart, as the defending Winston Cup champion, gets a $5,000 “special award” for just showing up and making the race. The top-finishing rookie driver wins $1,000; the teams eligible for the “McDonald’s Drive-Thru Pit Championship” win $20,000, and the eligible overall leading team at the end of the season wins a whopping $200,000.

Drivers also get prize money through sponsorship arrangements with manufacturers and, at a few tracks, if they lead a lap at a race.

Keeping it all straight, Branham said, explained his behavior after a race.

“When you see me up there with smoke coming out of my ears, now you know why,” he said.