Lowe's Motor Speedway is home track for almost every driver in the Winston Cup Series, so every driver wants to earn a victory there.

Although Tony Stewart's list of venues he's conquered has grown, Indianapolis, Daytona and Charlotte always have been the conspicuous absentees.

"Yeah, this is kind of the home track for everybody with 90 percent of the Winston Cup shops being within a 25 mile radius around the race track here," Stewart said of Lowe's. "It's hard not to want to win here. But it's one of the places where it's really hard to win."

On Saturday, Stewart fixed that as he added Charlotte to the list by chasing down Ryan Newman and winning the Lowe's first Saturday night fall race.

This should have been predictable, though.

After all, Stewart is always hot during the second half of the Winston Cup season. And he seems to excel at night races. Add to that the fact that he had one of the fastest cars at Lowe's Motor Speedway before his engine blew this summer in the Coca-Cola 600, and you've got a No. 20 Chevrolet team that came to Charlotte with some serious confidence.

"I've always been a fan of Saturday night races," Stewart said. "I just like them. I've run more races in my career at night than I have during the daytime. It's just something I enjoy doing."

And it's something he excels at, too.

On Saturday, Stewart used precise pit stops and fresh tires to catch Newman and win the race. Afterward, he declared his satisfaction that the fastest car finally won a race, jabbing at the number of races this season won through fuel mileage.

But the team was really just happy that it finally won with the fastest car, believing that it had brought the fastest car to several tracks this year but missed out on Victory Lane because it kept shooting itself in the foot -- poor pit stops, tire choices, fuel mileage decisions and engine problems plagued the team all year long.

	Stewart (20) caught and passed Newman (12) late in Saturday's race.

"We had the potential to have four or five or six wins this year, and we weren't able to close the deal on it," Stewart's crew chief Greg Zipadelli said. "We've had some issues, but we came on strong the second half of the year like we normally do and (it's) moving us back up in the points where we can make the most of it."

Stewart has gone from 14th to seventh in points in the past 12 races and is looking to possibly crack the top five with five races left this year. If he gains the 216 points that separate him from a top-six finish before the year's out, Stewart will maintain his career-long streak of finishing sixth or better since his rookie year in 1999.

If he's able to do it, he'll credit -- once again -- his reliable second-half surge; an annual occurrence that's a lot easier to predict than to explain.

"I wish I knew because if I did I'd make it start at the beginning of the season and carry it through the whole year," Stewart said. "The only thing I can think of is, with my background in sprint cars and midgets, I was used to tracks being slippery and hot, and it seems like early in the year, clear up through May and early June, the tracks are so cool they retain a lot of grip. Everybody is fast when they have a lot of grip.

"It's kind of like a sticky dirt track. Everybody's fast when it's sticky, but when it gets dry-slick and blows off, the guys that really get their teams working good and their cars going good go to the front. At this time of the year, all the heat from the summer is still in the track, and when the tracks get slippery and the tires do fall off, like they did tonight, those are the tracks where we really go good."

Zipadelli said the team's been waiting for a turn of fortunes like this. But it never got too down on itself in the meantime. The 20 team still has the big trophy and, at least for another five races, the title that every team desires.

"It's been frustrating, but knowing that you reached the ultimate goal of winning the championship last year makes this year a little easier to deal with," Zipadelli said.

Rupen Fofaria is a freelance writer living in Chicago and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at rfofaria@espnspecial.com.