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.

Editor's Note: I can't believe this thing censors the word spelled out in the title. Shame I had to do that to get a point across...

I'm not writing this from Dover. That would amount to something sort of workish, and work is not allowed while tailgating. Thankfully, the tailgating actually ended around 8:00 last night. Had this been a previous year, I would have drank enough to make it feel like this guy was trying to break out of my skull by way of my forehead:



Dover is a wonderful racetrack. It would be a crying shame if it was to lose a race date, because it's definitely one of the most unique venues on the schedule (old-timers: did you ever think you'd see the day when a true oval would be considered a unique track style in NASCAR? Damned cookie-cutter tracks...). Realistically, the ideal situation would be to remove 600 miles from Pocono -- kill off one race and then another 100 miles from the remaining one, and it would become somewhat tolerable. But that's a different post. I digress...

Well, this photo pretty much sums up the race: one big wreck up front, with nothing exciting left to see at the end.




There was plenty of passing in the early portions of the race. Three cautions in the first 100 or so laps actually had me thinking in the stands, for the first time ever, "wow, this is a long race." It could be related to the fact that Dale Earnhardt, Jr. once again found himself in the back of the back because of someone else's miscue -- in this case, Elliott Sadler. The best line of the day came from Tony Stewart, who "claimed" 100 percent of the blame for being caught up in the accident, and adding that, "it's my fault for being anywhere close to Elliott. If I'm within a half a lap of him, I expect that to happen." Zing!

Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards and, ultimately, Kyle Busch proceeded to stink up the joint. Biffle led 151 of the first 157 laps (and then some more, but that was what I could hear over the loudspeaker in one of the few moments of the day when my scanner headphones were not holding up my broken sunglasses). Edwards led for a while, then Busch took over. Honestly, "there was a wreck, three guys led the bulk of it, and Kyle Busch led after going so fast he almost lapped himself" pretty much sums up the day. Makes me wish I bothered to drink more beer during the event.

This time last year, the race was just finishing up. That's because we sat through a cold, windy, rainy day on Sunday only to have to return on Monday to actually witness a race. I'm not entirely sure which year was a worse experience, to be brutally honest.