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.