Some observations on Sunday's race from David Poole of The Charlotte Observer and ThatsRacin.com:
There were a few people rabble-rousing after the race, trying to drum up controversy about whether NASCAR should keep trying until it gets a green-white-checkered. That’s ridiculous. You can’t keep piling laps onto the end of a race.The first race Rick Hendrick came to with his father was at Martinsville, but three years ago on this weekend 10 people, including Hendrick’s son, Ricky, and brother, John, died in the crash of a Hendrick team plane on the way here. “It’s hard to come up here,” Hendrick said. “But it’s better to be here than to be at home. ... As soon as I walk in here and get with the guys, they are my family, too. I am with people who care about us. We can’t undo what was done. ... We miss all of those folks.”Surely nobody believes that Jeff Gordon can just coast to the championship from here. Early in Sunday’s race, he had a loose lug nut on a pit stop and had to come back in. When he got back on track, he was 33rd. Had that on his last pit stop, what would that have done to the title race? One mistake, literally, still is all it takes.
