For months now, I’ve been saying that people need to watch out for Tony Stewart once the Chase for the Nextel Cup gets going.

His pattern during his Cup career has been to start slowly, with tension building to the boiling point at some point during the summer. Then, he wins a race or two and all of a sudden it seems like he’s finishing in the top five every week.

So I looked it up, and the numbers aren’t as dramatic as I thought they would be. This is his sixth season, and Sunday’s win at Watkins Glen was the 19th of his career. It was the 11th to come in the second half of a season.

In the first halves of his first six seasons, Stewart has 34 top-five and 58 top-10 finishes. Sunday was his 41st top-five finish in a second-half race, and he’s already got 59 top 10s in the second half with 14 more chances this year to add to that total.

The fact that Stewart won Sunday after fighting his way through stomach cramps early in the race showed how tough he is.

But based on what I saw watching the telecast, I’d be willing to bet that if Stewart’s team could have found Scott Pruett at the track there would have been a driver switch made.

“The only person we could find was Boris (Said), and he’s obviously a little taller than Tony,” crew chief Greg Zipadelli said. Actually, Said is significantly taller than Stewart, whereas Pruett’s height is much more comparable.

Zipadelli sent Said back to the team’s transporter and had him climb into the team’s backup car to test out the fit.

“We wanted to see if he could get in it first and see if the belts would work for him,” Zipadelli said. “The only thing bothering him was that the steering wheel was going to hit his legs. We went back to green before we could get everything all together.”

If Pruett had been there and ready to go, as bad as Stewart was feeling at that point, it’s likely the decision to change would have been made.

What would have happened after that? As good as Stewart’s No. 20 Chevrolet was, Pruett may very well have won the race anyway. Pruett finished second in a Chip Ganassi-owned car at Watkins Glen last year and knows what he’s doing on a road course. Given a car that good, he would have been hard to beat.

Speaking of being hard to beat, how badly would Ron Fellows have whipped the field Sunday if he’d been driving the No. 20 Chevrolet?

I mean no disrespect to Dale Earnhardt Inc., which fielded the No. 1 car for Fellows in the race. The car was still good enough for him to come from 43rd to finish second.

But put Fellows in what was clearly the best car in the field, and give him a top-flight, Cup-level crew to do his pit stops, and he might have won by half a lap.

Some fans think I hate road-course racing. I don’t, as long as road-course racers are doing it with road-course cars.

What I don’t care for is road-course races on the Nextel Cup circuit. To me, what happened Sunday is as different from what happens in 34 of the season’s 36 races as figure skating is from ice hockey. It’s not two versions of the same thing, it’s two different kinds of racing.