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.

Contrary to what the subject claims, we'll do this chronologically. Come back in time with me five days.

Last Sunday saw one of the better Pocono races in recent memory. That's not saying much, because Pocono has never been a nail-biter. As Klvalus said Monday, I almost nailed it with my call of Carl Edwards winning after he and Kasey Kahne took turns dominating. In a way, I was very close: the two had the best cars, but a late flat tire almost derailed Edwards' day entirely. The most exciting thing to watch was Edwards' late-race run through the field, from 32nd to 9th in the final 20 laps. That was followed closely by Dale Earnhardt, Jr. managing to pull off a top-five finish on older tires than the rest of the leaders. The finer points:

• I'd like to take a moment here and praise NASCAR's RaceView. If you can swing the $69.95 annual fee, it's well worth the money at less than $6 per month. It was insane watching Kyle Busch's accident look exactly the same on a computer simulation as it did in real life. NASCAR has a real winner here.
• Speaking of Busch's accident, what was he thinking? His spotter never actually cleared him, and he relied on his instincts. He's proven time and again that, while he can handle a car with the best in history, his instincts almost always result in mangled sheet metal. He has a long way to go before he can be considered a top-tier driver, no matter how many times he wins.
• I was somewhat impressed with TNT's RaceBuddy. The multiple camera angles are fun to watch, but it has a deal-breaking flaw for me: there's no way to completely disable the audio. I prefer to listen to a specific driver at any given time, but it gets drowned out by the track audio from RaceBuddy. I hope they fix that, because I'd like to see more of it. It's a novel idea if nothing else.
• The high line is now the fast way around two out of the three corners at Pocono. Satan just called, he asked for his winter coat.

This week, NASCAR got sued! A former black female official (if you haven't heard about this already, trust me, her gender and race are critical to the story) has sued the organization for wrongful termination, sexual harassment and racial and sexual discrimination. I will withhold most judgment, but for now, but I will say this: most of me wants to call B.S. on the case based solely on the fact that her claims encompass almost every current, pop-cultural stereotype of both blacks and women, as well as the stereotypical country bumpkin. I've lived in Texas and I currently live in North Carolina; to hear her tell it, NASCAR employs every redneck in the south. That, and her case reads like a press release for an joint venture between the NAACP and the Women's Lib movement.

This week's fantasy update: Carl Edwards (9th), Martin Truex, Jr. (17th), David Reutimann (19th) and Jamie McMurray (20th) gave me all four drivers in the top half of the finishing order; unfortunately, only one was in the top 10. Not the best two-week stretch I've ever had. This week it looks like Matt Kenseth, Greg Biffle, Ryan Newman and A.J. Almendinger as the starters right now, but I have Carl Edwards, David Ragan, Kyle Bush and Travis Kvapil waiting if my starters don't show me something in practice tomorrow.

On to Michigan! Starting with Pocono, we're now in the throes of the Fuel Mileage Fast Lane™. Two trips each to Pocono and Michigan, plus two road courses and a venture to Auto Club Speedway (California), mean that seven of the twelve races between last weekend and Labor Day Weekend have a significant chance to have the outcome decided by who can go the furthest on a tank of gas. Bristol is in there somewhere, though, as well the Soft-drink Swap 400 (Pepsi 400 becomes the Coke Zero 400 this year), so it's not an entire loss this summer.

Who takes the checkers this week? Well, I'm torn between Kenseth and Edwards as the "typical favorites" here. The recent surge by Red Bull Racing's Brian Vickers and A.J. Almendinger could be the x-factor, though. It's a big, wide-open track, and the Toyotas definitely have a horsepower advantage. If Hendrick Motorsports can get a few more horses this week, they could be a threat too. Jeff Gordon is historically good here, and Earnhardt has been up front here a lot over the last two seasons. But Kasey Kahne has won here, too, and he's the hot driver in the series right now. Add in the fact that qualifying got rained out and this week really is wide open. Scary.

The Final Word: NASCAR hastily called a meeting today for all drivers and team members. The content of the meeting is up for grabs at this point: NASCAR officials say it was entirely a reminder that the racing is all about the fans, and that nothing else was discussed. Drivers seemed to hear, "stop pissing and moaning about the new car," and claim that the topic of the fans never came up. The two sides only agreed that the pending lawsuit was not part of the discussion. InvertedMind sides with the drivers; NASCAR officials had time to align their stories and rehearse responses. The drivers were caught off guard by it, whatever it was about, and all had independent opinions that NASCAR is fed up with the competitors throwing the car under the bus. If that's the case, they better stop saying it's about the fans, and that they want the drivers to express themselves more. Telling them what they can't say is bordering on fascism.

Pocono is one of the harder tracks to predict. It's not that it's got such incredible competition -- on the contrary, as I alluded to a few days ago, it becomes quickly clear who found the setup and who didn't. No, the predictions become difficult because Pocono is a schizophrenic racetrack.

Sometimes, there are 10 cautions and a late-race shootout. Other times, it's a fuel-mileage race (isn't it weird how some tracks have a tendency to be decided by fuel mileage, and there's always a bunch of guys really close to running out, but other tracks never seem to have the pit sequence come up just right for fuel to be a factor?). And, still, other races wind up with a 30- or 40-lap green-flag run at the end that results in a typical pit sequence, after which that one guy who found the setup late in the race runs away and hides.

Add to that the fact that the CoT(oday) (I'm going to trademark that...) makes its Pocono debut tomorrow, and it looks like we're setting up for either a really sloppy race or a snoozer, by the standards of casual fans. I, for one, do not believe in the equation that states that "wrecks equal exciting racing" but that's a topic for another post. As for the potential for a sloppy race, I'd have to say the chances are marginal at best, for two reasons:

1. The "patch" that runs from the exit of the tunnel turn through turn three has made it possible to run two-wide competitively through what was once a hard place to negotiate side-by-side; and
   
2. We've already seen from most of the races this year that this car is orders of magnitude more difficult to get sliding sideways.

So, what does Swami I.M. predict for tomorrow? Well, considering my own mother rarely takes me seriously (and with good reason), I feel it's safe to predict the following without potential for ridicule: Joey Lagano will begin running to Pocono from Nashville at the moment the green flag drops, arrive in Pocono by lap 75, do a green-flag driver swap with Casey Mears* (who should be four or five laps down in a beat-up race car by that time anyway), fight back to the lead lap without the aid of a Lucky Dog free pass, and then win it going away. Given that he has -- and this is just hearsay at this point -- moved mountains with nothing more than a paper clip and a dirty look*, and is rumored to be the man who will bring peace to the Middle East**, it seems like a safe bet.

And, in case I'm wrong about that one (highly likely since Lagano isn't scheduled to be anywhere near Long Pond, Pennsylvania by my calculations), I'll give you a backup prediction (if Jeff Gordon can wreck his primary in the All-Star race, jump in a backup car and go on to win, I think I have at least a snowball's chance in Maui to be right here): Carl Edwards wins after he and Kasey Kahne take turns dominating throughout the day.

• So, how did InvertedMind's fantasy team do last week? Greg Biffle (3rd), Martin Truex, Jr. (6th), Jimmie Johnson (7th) and Sam Hornish, Jr. (18th) combined for 341 points, good for 5th out of 14 for the week. Coming in to this week, I had leap-frogged from 6th to 4th overall.
• This week's fantasy team: Carl Edwards, Martin Truex, Jr., Jamie McMurray and David Reutimann. The one I am most iffy about on the list is Reutimann, but not so much because of his 36th-place starting spot. The real problem is how ready he'll be tomorrow after racing to a hard-fought 3rd-place finish in Nashville tonight. I suppose only time will tell.
• The Final Word: I'm not entirely sure what to make of TNT's "RaceBuddy" that will debut on NASCAR.com tomorrow. It's free, and having access to an in-car camera at all times is pretty cool. I also like the pit road camera, and fan chat will add to the experience. Here, though, are my top three concerns:
• Is it just me, or is the "mascot" somewhat stereotypical of the southern NASCAR fan? A baseball cap that seems to be styled after a trucker cap, work boots, and what appears to be the beginnings of a mullet. Hand the guy a Budweiser, take his shirt off and paint a big, red "3" on his chest*** and he'd look like every male fan on top of an infield RV.
• The in-car camera is voted on periodically throughout the race, and changes every 50 laps. Given that Dale Earnhardt, Jr. inevitably wins every poll he's ever listed in, how long will it be before TNT removes him from the list of drivers eligible?
• NASCAR.com's RaceView and PitCommand (obsessives like me require both) are already almost maxing out my aging laptop. Add in the driver audio and the network is almost fried, too. Which will I have to sacrifice in order to experience RaceBuddy?
• Bonus Concern (4 for the price of 3!): It's TNT, for God's sake. These are the people who felt like Alan Bestwick was best suited for work on pit road, while believing the perpetually mind-numbingly boring Bill "My Mom Thinks I'm Clever" Webber was the right choice for the booth. Much like the glory days of Monday Night Football were in the mid-1990s with Frank Gifford, Al Michaels and Dan Dierdorf, so too was the high point of NASCAR broadcasting when we could tune in to hear Mike Joy, Buddy Baker, Benny Parsons (RIP) and Ned Jarrett. I long for those days of country music and more racing than commercials. Of course, I also loved watching American Sports Cavalcade on TNN after their race coverage, so I don't know how psycho that makes me.

* - I had J.J. Yeley here first.  I guess I should have checked the lineup before I opened my big fat fingers.
** - Cleary, if Chuck Norris hit MacGyver with nothing more than a bare fist, it would create temperatures high enough to cause nuclear fusion. According to Mark Martin and anyone in the Joe Gibbs Racing garage, Joey Lagano would be the end result.
*** - Lagano has been treated like the second coming of Jesus Christ up to this point, so this sounded like a pretty sound rumor to start.
**** - Rest in Peace, Dale Sr. We miss you every day. The fact that you still inspire r3dn3cks (EDIT: I had to spell it that way; can you believe FoxSports.com censors that word?) of all walks of life to honor you with body paint is a tribute to your lasting legacy, no matter how tacky the display may seem to some more "modern" fans. I, for one, smile every time I see it to this day.

It seems like everyone these days has a complaint or seven about Pocono and its Baja 1000-like marathon race days.  Unfortunately, the track combines the great elements of exciting racing -- speeds in excess of 200 miles per hour, heavy braking zones that can ruin someone's day with nothing more than a simple locked-up wheel, a unique shape, varied turn radii and banking -- but combines them in a way that essentially creates a perfect storm of boredom. 

First of all, usually one or two guys can find a really good setup.  Second, the weather in the Pocono Mountains can change quicker than a schizophrenic under extreme duress.  And the track is viciously large, meaning it can be a long time before a leader gets mired in lapped traffic and allows others to catch up.  We're talking about a place where lap times exceed 50 seconds by a long shot.

Someone had to do it.  Someone had to come up with a way to make the race more exciting.  So here's my list -- and it will not include "shorten the race to 400 miles."

1) Turn loose a roving pack of two dozen white-tail deer on the racing surface.  PETA may not be happy with you, but it would make a three-wide battle for 31st position down the Long Pond straightaway a lot more exciting.

2) Land mines in the tunnel turn.  As if this wasn't one of the most difficult turns in NASCAR already.

3) Make half the field run clockwise.  And then, at the midpoint of the race, make all drivers reverse their current direction.  Under green.

4) The top-12 drivers in points have to race blindfolded.  In Kyle Busch's case, he may wreck fewer drivers than normal.

5) Two-drink minimum at the drivers' meeting.

6) Le Mans-style dash to the cars when the green flag drops.  Throw in "dizzy bats" and it would put a whole new twist on the phrase, "running start."

If NASCAR isn't down with these ideas, then they can always do something...I don't know...logical?  The aforementioned shortened race distance is a good start, but the length of the race isn't the problem.  The perceived lack of competition is.  Shrink the fuel cell, use softer tires, etc. 

Or maybe -- just maybe -- the fans can start to appreciate that Pocono is truly a driver's race track.  It's a place where the cream rises to the top, similar to places like Darlington, Dover and Phoenix.  These are places that are unique, and require the driver to learn how to race the track first, and the competition second -- like the good, old days, when men were men and racing was about who could conquer a unique and adverse day, not just get an optimally prepared car to perform on an optimally configured, cookie-cutter race track.  Pocono is a place where a gifted driver can take an average car and look like a god for a day.