I want to be the first to make this point today: the Brickyard 400 can only be described as a (very unfunny) comedy of errors.  And those errors get pinned to the collars of no one but NASCAR and, even more, Goodyear.

It hasn't been a secret this season that tire wear has been a problem.  Indianapolis is known to be an abrasive track.  The tire test done here was done at a time of the year when the air and track temperatures were cooler.  It's not exactly rocket science to deduce that bring a softer tire to this track will result in major issues.

So far today -- at less than 50 laps into the event -- tire issues have plagued Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Juan Pablo Montoya, Carl Edwards, Mark Martin and Matt Kenseth.  And Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson have both run the tires completely down to the cords and were probably each a mere one or two laps from having a catastrophic blowout.  And that was on just 12 laps of racing!

NASCAR needs to postpone the remainder of the race until Monday, have Goodyear ship in about 500 harder-compound tires from their Ohio factory, and pick up from this point around 10:00 a.m. so the track is cool as long as possible.

This is sad.  Just plain sad.  And we, as fans, are being ripped off.  This isn't a race, it's a battle of attrition.

I will continue this thread as the day rolls on.  Chime in with your thoughts, because I know you all were expecting a race today, not this load of crap.

If you read what I wrote here Saturday, you would understand why I believe Sunday's race ending short because of rain is sweet, sweet irony.  Come on, the sponsor was able to get the race expanded by a single lap so they could say they "go the extra mile," but then the race was cut 17 laps short (if I'm off a little on that number, oh well; I pulled it out of thin air)?  That's divine intervention at work.

So, a company called LENOX Industrial Tools -- makers of things like pipe wrenches -- had their namesake event cut short by, essentially, a water leak.  Sure, God's great expanse is a pretty big thing in which to fix a leak, but it still makes for classic, reap-what-you've-sown humor.

Here are the high-and-lowlights of the weekend:

• Juan Pablo, I'd like to shake your hand and slap you in the back of the head at the same time.  Sure, Shrub deserved a good punting after all the arrogance he's displayed on the track since Day One in the big leagues, but that's not the way to do it.  Take a lesson from Kevin Harvick (you know, the guy you got up close and personal with last year at Watkins Glen?): wait until you get out of your car at some point, then go after him.  It's a lot more entertaining for the fans, and you aren't going to risk taking out half the field doing it, either.
• Jamie, hire a new spotter.  The only two people in New Hampshire who didn't know Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was pitting were you and the guy telling you where to go.
  
• Jimmie, you get the quote of the week.  While he's gotten better about it lately -- probably because of the six-year championship drought that is likely to expand to seven at the end of November -- Jeff Gordon* has walked around for a decade acting like he's entitled to whichever piece of asphalt he wants, and if you're in his way then that's just too bad for you.  Calling your own teammate -- your own shop mate! -- a "spoiled brat" on the radio after he failed to give you any semblence of room off the corner?  Priceless!**
• Is it just me, or did Tony Stewart look like he was about to cry after the race?  A softer, kinder, gentler, post-menopausal Smoke?
• Casey Mears led a bunch of laps -- two days after the world found out he wasn't going to have a job after the season ended.  When was the last time all four Hendrick drivers were mentioned in the same race recap?
• And, finally, a shout-out to race winner Kurt Busch and, more importantly, our own Kristen, the eternal Kurt optimist.  Miller Lite all around!  And then a beer to wash it down!
  

* - I am not a fan of Jeff Gordon.

** - Or Jimmie Johnson.

Marketing has taken a very prominent role in NASCAR over the last two decades.  The selling power of guys like Dale Earnhardt, Sr., Jeff Gordon and now Dale Earnhardt, Jr. has brought NASCAR from country music and Budweiser to rock 'n roll and fine wine.  Some teams have sponsors lining up to make sales pitches, whereas it used to be the exact opposite.

Let me point something out before I run with this thought any further: I am all for adjusting the race distances when necessary.  I read this week the idea of shortening all races to around 300 laps/miles and only counting green-flag laps.  Having essentially lived at the local dirt tracks in western Pennsylvania as a kid, I'm a huge fan of not counting caution laps.

But changing race distances should be reserved for strategic purposes, not marketing.  The LENOX Industrial Tools 301 (as in, "we go the extra mile")?  Come on guys, really?  The Aarron's 312 and 499 races are bad enough, but at least those are product/service tie-ins, and not just a mockery of cheesy, over-used, we-can't-think-of-anything-better marketroid drivvel.  Has NASCAR really come to this?

Officials have spent the first half of the season trying to convince us that they want to "get back to basics" this season.  Well, guys, listen up.  The list of ways to get back to basics boils down to these things that made NASCAR so entertaining for five decades before it became the Mongolian Cluster$%@& is is today:

1. Drivers used to have personalities.  Darrell Waltrip was known for his big mouth when he was young.  The fist-fight in turn three at Daytona in 1979 was one of the biggest reasons NASCAR has "made it" in mainstream sports.  And Jimmy Spencer knocking Kurt Busch's block off?  That was a thing of beauty.  And if the talking heads at NASCAR want us to believe them when they tell us they're letting the drivers be themselves this year, they really should try harder to convince us than privately telling the drivers to shut up about the new car's problems and actually fix the problems.  Actual quality goes a lot further in the long run than perceived quality.
2. Let them race.  All the boundaries NASCAR has put up "in the name of safety" has taken away the exciting, ballsy moves guys used to make.  Telling them they have to race between the yellow line and the wall, have to cross the commitment line entering the pits, can't race back to the yellow flag, etc. reminds me of the carnival scene from The Jerk (with Steve Martin) where he is explaining to a guy what he cn win if his character can't guess his weight: "Uh, anything in this general area right in here. Anything below the stereo and on this side of the bicentennial glasses. Anything between the ashtrays and the thimble. Anything in this three inches right in here in this area. That includes the Chiclets, but not the erasers."
3. Include the manufacturers.  Now, more than ever, Ford, Chevy and Dodge need NASCAR.  This is an American sport and, while I generally have no issue letting foreign manufacturers compete, I do take issue with the amount of money NASCAR is allowing Toyota to pump into the system while the other three are struggling to simply break even in the marketplace.  Sure, it's their own fault they've fallen by the wayside in auto sales, but NASCAR essentially kicked the manufacturers out of the sport when they went to a common template.  The manufacturer battle used to be a very entertaining part of the sport; now it hardly gets mentioned, because you have to see the stickers on the front of a car to know what company "made" it.  There is no manufacturer identity, and therefore no reason to actively participate.  Toyota has taken advantage of this, and the fact that their entry into the sport was the number one story line entering the 2007 season.
4. Get rid of the cookie-cutter tracks.  I don't think I need to elaborate on this one besides this statement: the fans want variety, and we aren't getting it anymore.  In a four-race span during the chase, the series goes to Texas, Charlotte and Atlanta -- three tracks with nearly identical layouts.  At the very least, take two of those races out of the chase and give us something unique.
5. And, finally, stop giving in to the almighty dollar.  It may be vital to the sport, but it shouldn't drive every last decision you make.  The founders of the sport are, no doubt, turning laps in their graves right now.

Now, on to the predictions.

This looks like it could be an off-week for Toyota.  Only one Toyota wound up in the top 10 in each of the first two practices, and the best in Happy Hour was Kyle Busch in 12th.  To top it off, only two qualified in the top 20 (A.J. Almendinger in 10th and Denny Hamlin in 12th).

From all appearances, this could be a battle between Juan Montoya and Kevin Harvick.  Montoya was in the top three in each practice, and was the fastest in both race-trim runs.  A weak qualifying run may hamper him, though, as he has a long road ahead of him from his 32nd starting spot if he plans to get to the front.  Harvick was first, sixth and fourth in the three practice sessions, and has a much-better fourth starting spot.  The other contenders are the usual suspects: the three J's (Jeff, Jimmie and Junior) from Hendrick Motorsports, who all had solid practices -- although Junior (fifth) is the only one of the three starting in the top 15 tomorrow -- Kyle Busch with solid but unspectacular practice runs, and Greg Biffle.  The darkhorse could be Dario Franchitti, who 1) is well-rested from his injury recovery, 2) has been no worse than 13th in practice, and 3) starts seventh tomorrow.

My call?  Kevin Harvick wins the LENOX Industrial Tools 303 -- because, with the history this place has, there will be a wreck in the final few laps of the scheduled distance, making the drivers "go the extra two miles."

Finally, a fantasy update.  Sunday Drive 2008 is still hanging around the top five in the Monster Milers.  Last week I gave up fifth spot, but thanks to a close battle at the top and five bonus points from yesterday's qualifying, I've got a three-point margin on sixth place.  If not for engine woes for Boris Said, it probably would have been a better week than fifth out of 14.

This week's team is Clint Bowyer, Bobby Labonte, Robby Gordon and Brian Vickers.  Not exactly a team full of all-stars, but I'll live with it.  Bowyer won here last year and has been okay in practice, as has Gordon -- another past-winner.  It could be a good week or a very slim one -- there's no in-between with this unpredictable group.

Editor's Note: I give up. I had a really good intro to this thing, but FoxSports.com censors 97 percent of the English language, so it ruined it for anyone who wants to leave censoring on. Here's the bland version instead.

That 800-pound gorilla (if that's censored, and you don't want to disable censoring, just know that it's a hairy jungle animal that tends to hang out in the mist) that sleeps wherever it wants? It needs to find a new place to rest, because there is no longer room at the inn on Dale Earnhardt, Jr.'s back.

The conspiracy theorists are already at it. Junior passed the pace car, he should have been black flagged for it, blah, blah blah.

Get over it, people. He's not the first to pass the pace car and won't be the last. And of the hundreds -- literally, hundreds -- of times it has happened in my 27 years, I have never once seen NASCAR do more than warn people about it unless it involved passing the pace car while the driver was attempting to get on to or off of pit road. Never. End of discussion. I've even heard that NASCAR warned him three times to stop it -- amazing, since the only mention of it during the broadcast said that "NASCAR has told the 88 team that they will be penalized if they pass the pace car again" or something very similar to that. And I was tuned to his pit communications the entire race, too. Eury only made mention of it to Earnhardt once.

Another good one I read a few minutes ago was that Kasey Kahne pushed Junior across the finish line, in which case it shouldn't have counted. There are two things wrong with that: 1) If Junior couldn't maintain an acceptable speed, Kahne would have been declared the winner. Why, in God's great name, would he have helped a competitor? And 2) I had Junior on RaceView as well, and was keeping a very close watch on his speed through three and four, and down the front stretch. He crossed the finish line at around 75 miles per hour, and never once accelerated as if someone was pushing him.

What about Vickers? I can't comment, they didn't show where he was at the moment of caution. Considering the two wildly different perspectives in the Steven Wallace/Carl Edwards incident under caution at Kentucky Saturday night, it's obvious that what a driver sees through his windshield is often very different from what actually happened.

The best of all was that "NASCAR gave Junior two cautions." Okay, let's analyze: first of all, Sam Hornish, Jr. spun on lap 197, but didn't hit anything. Could the race have continued green? Possibly -- but had that been the case, it would have helped Junior if it had stayed the way it was. He had enough fuel in the tank, as we saw, to get to lap 203 with four laps of caution. Using the two-caution-laps-to-one-green-lap rule, and considering the Hornish yellow was four laps long, he would have made it to lap 201 -- more than he needed. Also keep in mind that Kurt Busch spun earlier in the race all by himself and they threw a yellow. For once, NASCAR was actually consistent in their caution flags.

And the final caution was obvious: Patrick Carpentier spun on the white-flag lap with other cars coming behind him. In this situation, and not including the 2007 Daytona 500, NASCAR has always thrown a caution in the name of driver safety. Plain and simple. If you don't believe me, go look at the video from previous races, all the proof you need is right there.

The fact of the matter is that there are people who don't feel Earnhardt has lived up to the family legacy, or is capable of it. I refer you to the 2004 season, in which he won six races and only fell out of contention for the championship after he misjudged how close he was to Carl Edwards at Atlanta. He's finished in the top five in points three times in his career, and did an awful lot the last two years in what can only be called inferior equipment. Last season alone, he had five engine failures while in the top 10. This year he has the resources to be competitive, and he's leading the Hendrick stables -- a team that includes two drivers with a combined six championships.

He's going to be scrutinized -- it comes with the family name. His dad spent years under the microscope because he was "Ralph Earnhardt's kid." But to say some of the things I've seen this evening on message boards is just ludicrous. A lot of people are calling it a cheap win because it was a fuel mileage win. Well, guess what? Here's a quick list of guys who have won races because they could go further on gas than anyone else: Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, Sr., Jeff Gordon, Jeff Burton, Mark Martin -- just to name a few. Heck, Jimmie Johnson did it at Phoenix earlier this year. These are distance races, not sprints; the point is not to have the fastest car, but to be the one who gets to the prescribed distance first. Sure, racing in traffic has a huge impact on it, but pit strategy is part of the game, and fuel mileage has a long history at Michigan. If you don't like it, tune in to the World of Outlaws. They don't make pit stops.

And one final word on the fuel mileage: Junior made a pit stop on lap 150. That ultimately required that he drive 53 laps on a single tank. He was running lap speeds around 165 to 167 miles per hour at a point in the race when the guys not saving fuel were averaging 171 to 173 miles per hour. That saved him four, maybe five laps. There were also seven caution laps, plus the extra measures he took during those caution laps (literally coasting with the engine shut off for more than half of each caution lap). He had been getting 41-42 laps per pit stop, and Eury, Jr. originally calculated he would be six laps short. That's 44 laps on a tank. In reality, he only needed to make up nine laps between all the caution laps and the fuel-saving tactics.

Yes, I'm biased toward the Earnhardt family. It's harder for me to see things involving that family objectively at times. But, for the love of God, if you're going to call B.S. on the win today, have at least half of a good argument.

It's no secret that running a NASCAR team is expensive.  The old cars, from the numbers I can remember, cost several hundred thousand dollars each.  The new car is supposed to cost less, but the up-front costs can't possibly be much different.  The savings are supposed to come from uniformity -- a car used at Talladega has the same basic configuration as a car used at Martinsville.

Unfortunately, the old car put such a distance between the top teams and the rest of the pack that it's hard for the backmarkers to catch up now.  The gap is huge, and now, when testing is needed most to further acclimate the drivers to the new car, the teams that had the most success with the old car have the greatest financial reserves from which to draw in order to pay for test sessions outside the NASCAR-sactioned events.

Dale Earnhardt, Jr. recently gave some insight into how often the front-running teams test compared to the also-rans, indicating that he has tested more in the last two months with his new team at Hendrick Motorsports than he usually did in a year at Dale Earnhardt, Inc.  With seven championships since 1995, Hendrick has achieved the kind of success that allows for those kind of expenditures.  Joe Gibbs Racing has won three championships since 2000, and they employ the current championship-leading team.

This week, we saw Petty Enterprises effectively change ownership.  While the Petty family still maintains a large stake in the company, majority ownership is now by a large investment firm.  This isn't the first time we've seen outside investment in NASCAR, either: Bobby Ginn had no physical interest in auto racing prior to entering the sport as an owner.  The ownership team of the Boston Red Sox -- technically a team within a competing sport -- have purchased a large stake of what used to be known as Roush Racing, now Roush-Fenway Racing.

NASCAR has clearly missed the obvious signs.  The sport has its roots deep in the soil of American automobile manufacturers, but as the tree has grown taller, the new growth is getting further and further from those roots.  The cars on the track once were the same cars we drove on the street.  Now, the only visible difference between a Ford Fusion and a Toyota Camry is the nameplate.  Toyota has a good reason to pump money into the teams: they're the new kid on the block, and they are trying to make a name for themselves in the only racing continent where they haven't already made a huge splash.  The money they have thrown at their teams -- particularly Gibbs Racing and Team Red Bull -- likely exceeds the gross domestic products of several developing nations.

The incumbent manufacturers, on the other hand, have less reason than ever to financially back their teams.  What was once a test bed for development and a high-speed showroom for their car models is now nothing more than a four-hour-long commercial each Sunday.  And considering how little resemblance there is between the cars on the track and the cars in their show rooms, there's just no direct tie from the race cars to the vehicles in our garages besides a name plate.  The manufacturers know this, the fans know this, and the sponsors know this.  The only people who seem to be missing the message are the people inside NASCAR HQ.

NASCAR desperately needs to cut costs.  The only way to do this is to get the manufacturers involved in the sport again.  That's a difficult task right now, considering the struggles of America's Big Three over the last decade, but proper planning could lead to a huge step forward for both sides. 

Something has to be done, before Victory Lane is renamed Wall Street.