Weekend That Was: Dover

While admitting that the world is still searching for the debris in Turn 2 that caused a caution flag to be thrown on Lap 355 of the Dodge Dealers 400 at Dover International Speedway on Sunday, was it really as bad of a race as many apparently seem to think?

Um, no. Not really.

The critics will say that it was ridiculous to have only six cars finish on the lead lap, and they would be correct. For Chase contestants Jeff Burton and Tony Stewart to finish seventh and ninth, respectively, despite being one lap down admittedly seems a little outlandish.

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The critics will point to the spring race at Dover last year, when 21 cars finished on the lead lap. That day, Martin Truex Jr. was the driver of the first car to complete the race one lap down -- and he had a 22nd-place finish to show for it.

Bash the Car of Tomorrow. Rip the track. Chastise eventual winner Carl Edwards for supposedly bending the rules by having his car fail post-race inspection (read more).

Kick the dog, if you must. (But please take it easy and apologize later, lest the animal activists start an e-mail campaign against this avowed dog lover).

All the while keep in mind that these races are supposed to be entertainment, and Sunday's race at least offered a healthy dose of that while keeping interest in the Chase at an optimum. And for those historians throwing the 2006 spring race in your face, remind them that Matt Kenseth was the first car to finish a lap down in the fall race at Dover a year ago -- and he was rewarded with a top-10 finish as only nine cars in that event finished on the lead lap.

The bottom line is that no race is going to be perfect. And here's a newsflash for you: during the ones that are less so, NASCAR will do everything it can to try to make it more so (especially when it can then offer to viewers the last 40 laps of a televised event commercial-free, which was a feeble attempt to make up for the first 360 that were commercial-saturated).

That means sometimes throwing caution flags to bunch up the field when the layman's naked eye has more than a little difficulty locating the debris for which said caution supposedly is being thrown. It's been going on in this sport to varying degrees for years.

It might be more manipulative than most fans or competitors want -- but like so many things in Nextel Cup racing, that often depends on one's point of view at the moment in question. If you weren't rooting for or driving one of the cars running in the top five late in Sunday's race, you better believe that the mysterious caution thrown on Lap 355 of the 400-lap event was welcome.

The problem was that it and the many other caution flags thrown Sunday directly contributed to much of the mayhem that almost immediately followed. Bad things are going to happen late in races when the field gets bunched up -- and nothing was worse Sunday than the 12-car pileup that ensued when something on Kurt Busch's No. 2 Dodge apparently broke and sent him slamming into the outside wall as he came out of Turn 2 on Lap 386, just two laps after the latest restart following a yellow (watch video).

Busch came down the track and hit Reed Sorenson's No. 41 Dodge, and then was rear-ended by teammate Ryan Newman in his No. 12 Dodge. Hey, it was the Dodge Dealers 400 and you have to admit: these Dodges were dishing out some heavy damage to each other.

Eventually a total of 12 cars were damaged in the wreck -- a Big One if there ever was One.