LOUDON, N.H. -- The other 11 drivers enter the Chase game-faced. Juan Pablo Montoya comes rollicking in, always running on the edge of laughing.

If sheer cool can win a championship, Montoya is a lock. I've never seen a driver enter NASCAR's playoffs feeling less pressure, having a better time -- and yet more calculating of what it will take to win the Cup.

"Oh, yeah, I'm loving it," he said Friday. "It's kind of nice having like zero pressure right now. It's cool."

I keep sensing that Montoya knows something the rest of us in and around NASCAR don't. But maybe that's just the joy he exudes at having figured out a system that was foreign to him until three years ago, when he phoned Chip Ganassi from Europe and said in the voice of a kid asking for a new toy, "I want to drive that car!" meaning Ganassi's No. 42.

Lately Montoya has been unabashedly points racing, tiptoeing through the latter races of the regular season, just to make sure he got into the Chase. Now, we shall see … Now, "you gotta go for broke," he said soon after not just winning the pole for Sunday's playoff opener, the Sylvania 300, but winning it with a track-record speed of 133.431 mph.

Then, as he is wont to do, Montoya hedged back and forth on the all-out charge for wins versus playing it smart and, perhaps, points racing some more, even deep into the Chase. He has learned a lot from one of his closest friends in the garage, Mark Martin, whose mantra is that the Chase won't really take shape until the halfway point.

"I think the first five races you definitely have to get a top-10 every week," Montoya said. "Ideally a top-5, but I think if you can get the first four or five races a pretty good average with good finishes" -- now the hedging to the other view -- "and if you get a chance to win you've got to take them now."

That said, I asked him if storming to the pole here might be an early indication that that chance might present itself Sunday.

"It's great" being on the pole, he said. "But you know how these races go. If it was a 10-lap shootout, would say, 'hahahey, we're lookin' gooood. But there's like 300 laps or something. It's a bunch of laps."

I pointed out that Jeff Burton led every lap on the quirky, 1-mile New Hampshire Motor Speedway in 2000.

"The chances of my leading every time coming out of the pits are pretty slim," Montoya said. "So you've got to have a good car for traffic."

Even with all that, his blown domination of the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard in July is fresh in his mind. Even after leading 116 laps, pit stops be damned, he was caught speeding on the pit road late in the race and wound up 11th.

So he's figured out the luck involved, the rule of "circumstances" -- as the NASCAR sage Richard Petty calls the way things fall -- and now Montoya asked rhetorically, right on the edge of laughing, "You can't change what's going to happen, can you?"

Crapshoot racing is fun compared to Formula One, from whence he came in 2006 when he tired of the politics and the mountainous BS, because "In Formula One when you've got the best car you're gonna win, and when you don't have the best car you don't win. It's that simple. Here, every week, you've got a shot at winning …"

Montoya has yet to win an oval-track race in NASCAR, but Indy in July, plus a third-place finish at Atlanta two weeks ago after leading 31 laps, indicate he's on the threshold.

"You always try," he said of winning, "but you always try being smart."

And then he hedged again, the philosophic pendulum swung back, and he said, "I think here you can go a little bit more out of control."

Out of control, or on the edge of it, was the way Montoya won seven F1 races under the raised eyebrows of the stodgier other drivers and media, who found him overly aggressive for the glamorous single-file promenade of Grand Prix racing.

Now he has reached some mental compromise, having worked out the math of the NASCAR points system. But if he reckons at a given moment that he can "go a little bit more out of control," then the Chase could take on a new kind of pizzazz, and he could make a run at becoming the first foreign-born driver to win the Cup.

But the international prospects have zero appeal to him.

"If I win the Cup, cool. That's it."

But a first? "No, that's not a big deal for me. I don't get any special treatment or anything. I wouldn't mind getting some, but I don't."

Again he went right to the edge of laughing -- was a little more out of control.

Big Bill France, who had the vision to found NASCAR, also had enough common sense not to defy the weather.

In July, he would start the Firecracker 400 at 10 a.m., knowing full well that if he went up against the afternoon thunderstorms along Daytona Beach, he would lose. Every time.

He scheduled some races by the long-range forecasts in the old Farmer's Almanac. It seldom steered him wrong.

That wisdom seems lost on his posterity. NASCAR keeps flouting the weather, and losing. Just asking for it, and getting it.

Two rainouts in a row now. Can we make it three? The long-range forecast for Sunday at Michigan International Speedway is partly cloudy, but we shall see. Another midafternoon start in the summertime on the North American continent, another risk of thunderstorms, another shot at racing on Monday.

One young crewman, trotting out of the drizzly garage area at Watkins Glen on Sunday evening, yelped, "I'm LOVIN' this Monday morning racing." The wry connotation was that he might as well get used to it.

Soon afterward, one fan commented in an ESPN Conversation, "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down."

A few more weekends like the past two, and those words, borrowed from the late Karen Carpenter, might become bumper stickers and T-shirts.

And that was one of the milder comments. TV viewers -- not to mention the fans at the tracks, who, by and large, can't come back on Mondays.-- are up to the gills with rainouts.

Little could have been done at Pocono on Aug. 2-3, with intermittent rain in the morning, other than for NASCAR to have demanded in advance that racetrack officials repair the "weepers," the cracks in the pavement that let water seep through, maddeningly, after rain has stopped.

Watkins Glen was another matter. I sat for nearly three hours and watched a massive weather front on the radar come down from Canada, mosey on across Lake Ontario and right at us. It was obvious the front was going to hit the Finger Lakes region of New York almost precisely at the scheduled starting time for the race. The lightning began only seconds before the command to start engines.

You sit and watch the weather come, and watch NASCAR officials sit there dawdling, staring at the radar screens without changing the schedule by a minute, then you start to figure many fans, who for years have been calling for emergency early starts to beat the weather, might be right.

By Monday, local fan Brian Ciaravino, who owns his own business and was able to come back for the postponed race, was wondering why they hadn't rescheduled the start for 10 a.m. instead of noon, noting that the humidity was building so that he feared another round of afternoon thunderstorms.

He'd been on the grounds since 7:30 a.m., as he had been every day of the race weekend. Had NASCAR called for an emergency noon start on Sunday, instead of 2:20 p.m., "I'd have been there," he said. A 10 a.m. start rather than noon on Monday? "I'd love it," he said.

As NASCAR has gone more and more to mid- and late-afternoon starts, and to night racing, I've noticed that NASCAR fans still tend to show up at the tracks early in the mornings, regardless. It's a habit formed through the decades.

Should NASCAR, on a given Sunday, see that rain was inevitable by 2:30 p.m. and call an emergency 10 or 11 a.m. start to beat the weather, I think cheers would go up from the incoming crowds. Fans would know NASCAR was trying to do something for them, the people who bought the tickets and traveled to the race, and therefore -- assuming you want to be fair about it -- those who deserve the highest priority.

But even TV viewers often complain vehemently about Monday starts, because they have to go to work and can't watch the race.

The assumed reason for the midafternoon starts is the West Coast TV market. How many woefully missed sellouts at Fontana and small gatherings at Sonoma will it take for NASCAR to realize that Californians largely don't care about the sport?

And from Californians who do, I've gotten plenty of e-mail over the years indicating that they're long accustomed to getting up early on Sundays to watch sports events in the East, and wouldn't mind doing so for NASCAR any more than they mind it for the NFL.

The other long-proposed alternative, developing rain tires for Cup cars, still seems a long way off at best. The difficulty is that the 3,400-pound cars are just too heavy for rain tires. Once the track went from wet to damp, treaded tires would tend to burn up through the corners due to the high friction and heavy weight.

Last year, Nationwide cars ran on rain tires on the road course at Montreal, but no tests have even been conducted on the current Cup car for rain tires.

With enough engineering and development, over time Goodyear probably could come up with adequate rain tires for Cup races. But neither the tire maker nor the sanctioning body is showing any inclination to go to such expense.

So the only real answer in the summertime is flexible starting times, and/or earlier starting times.

As it is, the midafternoon starts are ticking off fans nationwide, two ways: forcing them to wait hours longer for the race to start than they want to even on a fair-weather day, and subjecting them to rainouts on the stormy afternoons.

The other element of nature that Big Bill France never defied was human nature -- the wrath of his fans.

He knew he'd have lost. Every time.

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- Another summer Sunday in the Northeast, another rainout for NASCAR. Last week Pocono, this time Watkins Glen. Again, the Cup cars didn't turn a wheel on the scheduled day.

Persistent drizzle on the Finger Lakes district of New York forced postponement of the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen road race until noon Monday.

This time, officials got to within 10 seconds of the command to start engines before lightning forced fans and teams to take shelter, and then the rain started.

At 4:04 p.m., NASCAR officials determined they couldn't get the track dry in time to run the full 90-lap, 220-mile race in adequate daylight. The road course is not lighted for night racing.

In a rapidly emptying garage, the only person with a smile on his face was Darian Grubb, Tony Stewart's crew chief.

Not that Grubb wasn't annoyed at the rainout, and not that the second in a row made it any worse.

"Every week's a new week," he said. "It's always annoying."

But on the brighter side, "It's going to be an interesting race tomorrow," Grubb said. "It's going to be hotter, and slick. It'll be fun to go."

Stewart will start 13th, but is a master of slippery tracks in general and road courses in particular, so, Grubb predicted, "It could play right into our hands."

The weather forecast for Monday isn't great, with a 40 percent chance of rain, but the predicted high is 86 degrees, after a weekend when drivers practiced and qualified on a cool track with ambient temperatures in the low 70s.

WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- There just might be more drivers capable of winning here Sunday than for any NASCAR road race I can remember. The era of oval-track stars giving up on turning right is fading fast.

The event is officially called the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen, about as awkward a mouthful as the profitable practice of title sponsorship has made yet. But, all things considered, this could indeed be a helluva good race.

Eight drivers in the starting lineup have won NASCAR road races, either here or at Sonoma, Calif., or both: Kyle Busch, Juan Pablo Montoya, Kasey Kahne, Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick, Robby Gordon, Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon.

The first four starters -- Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Denny Hamlin and Marcos Ambrose -- haven't won a Cup road race yet, but appear entirely capable.

"In the old days it was going to be Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace and Ricky Rudd, and you could count on that," said Boris Said, now an ESPN analyst and the longtime tutor and guru of road racing techniques to the long-resistant Cup drivers. "Now, there are 15 or 20 guys who can win here, easily."

The practice of substituting "road racing ringers" for Cup drivers is dwindling. There are only three true ringers in Sunday's field: Andy Lally for David Gilliland, Patrick Carpentier for Michael Waltrip and Ron Fellows for Sterling Marlin. Three more non-Cup regulars are entered due to road-racing skills, but in cars fielded especially for them: Said, P.J. Jones and Tony Ave.

The difference in the Cup regular on a road course from 10 years ago is "night and day," Said said. "I remember 10 years ago when I substituted for Jimmy Spencer ... my first time ever in a Cup car. I had to come from the back after the driver change. It seemed easy to pass these guys.

"And now -- to get into the Chase they can't afford to give up those points. So they've all worked at it. I've always said these guys are the best drivers in racing. But road racing is really just a different discipline. And a lot of these guys, like Kevin Harvick and Kasey Kahne, guys I've worked with, were terrible when they started and then after the test they're faster than I am.

"So it's like showing a duck water," Said continued. "Once you give them a few things that are different, and how to do it, they work at it."

Said Ambrose, who grew up road racing in Tasmania, Australia, and Europe before turning to NASCAR: The Cup drivers "don't do it a lot but they've had good training, they've had good experience now in the two tracks that we go to and they're forced to contend with.

"Kasey Kahne winning at Infineon [in June] surprised many," Ambrose continued, "but it didn't surprise me because you can just tell that he can drive the wheels off a race car whether it's on a road course or an oval."

Overall, "The depth is huge," Ambrose said. "The road course ringers that come in haven't had the impact like they used to five or six or seven years ago ..."

Said Martin, NASCAR's preeminent road racer of the early 1990s who has since been deluged with competition: NASCAR drivers have improved "significantly" on the serpentine circuits.

When he was winning here -- three in a row, 1993 to 1995 -- "it was much easier to put a whipping on two-thirds of the field then than it is today," Martin said. "That's because the whole field has pretty much the same access to all the knowledge that we do [he learned his expertise from his car owner of the time, road racing specialist Jack Roush] and the drivers have all really stepped up to the plate."

So have the team engineers and mechanics, with much stronger road racing specialty packages -- especially brakes, which Kahne credits a great deal for his win at Sonoma.

"The biggest key to success to this racetrack for success, other than staying on the road, is brakes," Said said. "They really pay a big dividend."

Jeff Gordon, NASCAR's all-time winningest road racer with nine wins -- four here and five at Sonoma -- dominated in the late 90s and kept winning into this century.

But, "We don't have the advantage over the competition that we had at one time," Gordon said. "Especially with this car [the COT] -- this car makes the competition so much tighter and so much closer that it's hard to get an advantage."

Watkins Glen is a much higher-speed circuit than Infineon, with more places to pass, and "I think especially the double-file restarts here are going to be pretty interesting," Montoya said. "I think they're going to be pretty wild. But you know, it's all about surviving."

With this many contenders, and double-file restarts, Heluva Good! might turn out to be an appropriate race name indeed.

LOUDON, N.H. -- Let's title this blog "An Afternoon of Life Around Tony."

You know who the leading candidate is to drive a third car for Tony Stewart if he fields one next year?

Me.

Eat your hearts out, Brad Keselowski, Martin Truex Jr. and Kasey Kahne -- the most oft-speculated drivers for the third Stewart-Haas Racing seat, should adequate sponsorship be acquired.

This is on the record. ESPN has it on audio and video.

"Hinton is our No. 1 draft pick right now in our books," Stewart said. "I mean, we've been watching him for years, and obviously, as you guys [the assembled media] heard, his depth and knowledge of the sport makes him a logical candidate."

Oh, well. Guess you picked up on the sarcasm.

Last time he offered me a ride was a couple of years ago at Daytona, where he said qualifying laps are so easy that "I could put Hinton in the car, especially because he's got so many laps around this place -- in his mind."

It's all part of the running banter between us that's been going on and off for years.

But because the local New England media, not very well versed in NASCAR, seemed all aghast and giggly over Stewart's shots, I thought it wouldn't hurt to explain.

"There's no such thing as a silly question, unless you already know the answer," my freshman chemistry professor at Ole Miss, Dr. George Vaughan, used to say.

Obviously I wandered far afield from premed, and so I hadn't encountered another adamant practitioner of that philosophy until Anthony Stewart, Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks, who simply cannot abide being asked a question to which the questioner already knows the answer.

That's how it started Friday. Although I knew better, I asked Stewart a question to which I already knew the answer, and he knew I knew -- and I knew he knew I knew. More about why I had to ask anyway in a minute.

I'd noticed there'd been eight different winners of the past eight races at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. That's unusual for a flat, tight, 1-mile oval where it's maddening to get a chassis setup right. Looks like whoever hits on the right setup ought to get the edge and hold it for a while.

I knew why it hasn't worked out that way: the changes as the track has aged after resurfacing … the harsh winters and hot summers that change the asphalt race to race … the rains that have cut some races short and left surprise winners -- take this race last year, when Stewart dominated but the rain found Kurt Busch in front and left him the winner … the advent of the frustrating Car of Tomorrow, a chassis setup nightmare … the ongoing scramble to make the new car work, in which teams try a different setup every time they come back to a track.

Everybody comes here guessing, every time, and somebody's right and the rest are wrong.

But the public doesn't want to hear me say it. They want to hear drivers say it.

"You just said it better than I can," Carl Edwards responded to a question of mine at Daytona this past February. Edwards chuckled. "Of course you did. That's your job."

But Edwards' stepfather is a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, so Edwards understands the rock and the hard place reporters get caught between, and does his best to answer anyway.

Not so with Professor Stewart. He deems all this a waste of time, and rightfully so, from his point of view. We've had our share of run-ins since he arrived as an Indy car rookie in 1996, but 90 percent of the time the issue has culminated with this: "Ed, you've been around long enough to know the answer as well as I do, so why do you ask me?" Or, "C'mon, Ed, you know the answer to that."

The real slam-dunk comeback, once, was, "Ed, you've been around this sport longer than I have. You know the answer better than I do."

And so it came to pass that the banter recurred on Friday when I asked Stewart about eight different winners in four years here.

Oh, another thing about Stewart: You've got to watch every word in how you phrase a question. Give him an opening, he'll pounce.

So my question ended, "Have you ever thought about why this has been such a crapshoot?"

I knew I was dead meat the moment "thought about" came out of my mouth. He dearly loves the ones that imply he would sit down and waste his time pondering the esoteric points of racing.

He gave me that Stewart look that only racing reporters know, and said, "I can honestly say I've never thought about that. Never have." He laughed.

Then he actually gave me a pretty good answer, which you can read in my other currently posted piece from Loudon -- it has a lot of quotes from a lot of drivers -- about eight winners in eight races here.

But the fun wasn't over, for then I went and did it, following up: "So it's a place you can get a handle on but not keep a handle on?"

I guess in the era of sound bites, we're all looking for the perfect sound bite. As my onetime colleague, the maestro sports columnist Dave Kindred, once said, "In this business, you ask 200 questions to get one answer."

So maybe I was fishing for a tighter answer.

"Well," Stewart said, "apparently if nobody has repeated in eight races, I would say that you kind of answered your own question, there, Ed. You could be smarter than all of us."

Just as I figured it was my turn at the top of Tony's bad list this weekend, FoxSports.com's Lee Spencer asked a question to which Stewart reckoned she knew the answer, and he said, "Go take a seat beside Hinton."

"So does Lee pass me for depth and knowledge of the sport?" I heckled.

"Uh … no," Stewart said.

Then Scenedaily.com's Bob Pockrass asked a highly technical question about rules for a backup car after Stewart had crashed his primary during opening practice. Pockrass asked if Stewart wouldn't have to go to the back of the field (which you do if you wreck a car during or after qualifying). But Stewart shot back that Pockrass ought to know that if you wreck a car before qualifying and go to a backup, but keep the same primary engine, then you can start where you qualify.

It was a minute technicality that has rarely if ever come up before, but Stewart pointed out that "It's only been in the rule book for five or six years, Bob … Hinton, pull up another chair over there beside you."

Then some local New England TV guy threw one right in Stewart's wheelhouse, asking if Stewart might ever go back to drive in the Indianapolis 500 again.

"Probably not, unfortunately," Stewart said. "We've answered that one about 8 million times too."

Then he went on to give a nice, elaborate answer as to why not. But he just had to get his shot in.

After the conference broke up, Stewart came over to me, grinning, saying, "You knew the answer to that question Bob Pockrass asked -- "

I hung my head. The rule was so minute, and had come up so rarely …

"Didn't you?"

I found a way to evade, bob and weave.

"You mean the rule about wrecking a car before you qualify," I said.

"Yeah," he said.

I nodded. He nodded. I was out of that one.

"So," I said, "Did Pockrass pass me at the checkered flag for depth and knowledge of the sport?"

"No," Stewart said. "We look at the big picture, long term."

"Lifetime achievement," cracked his chief publicist, Mike Arning.

Just an afternoon of life around Tony.

Methinks this is the big one, the real deal, the Category 5 hurricane headed straight for Formula One.

The big teams are in full revolt, according to the storm warning that arrived in my e-mail Thursday evening from the Formula One Teams Association.

I know, I know: Teams have threatened a breakaway series before, a few years ago when the big European manufacturers, especially BMW and Mercedes-Benz, grew weary of the greedy shenanigans of F1 rights-holder Bernie Ecclestone and his FIA chief, Max Mosley.

That rebellion failed because Ferrari, the most popular racing team in the world, bailed on the others and sided with the FIA.

Here is the titanic difference: The advisory sent out by Silverstone on Thursday evening -- actually around midnight Greenwich Mean Time -- was signed: "Statement issued by FOTA on behalf of BMW-Sauber, BrawnGP, Scuderia Ferrari, McLaren-Mercedes, Red Bull Racing, Renault, Scuderia Toro Rossa, Toyota." (Bold is mine, for emphasis.)

Not only is Ferrari in this time, but Ferrari is the ring leader. Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo was the first to howl when Mosley came up with his ludicrous $60 million spending cap for teams accustomed to spending up to half a billion dollars a year each.

Ecclestone, known to bail on Mosley in a pinch, this time tweaked the noses of the big guns by supporting the cost-cutting measures.

So now, allied with di Montezemolo are some of the toughest hard-ballers ever to walk the F1 paddocks: Renault's maverick Flavio Briatore, McLaren's icy-blooded Ron Dennis, Mercedes' Norbert Haug and the skyrocketing engineer who bought out Honda and made it the best team in F1, Ross Brawn.

This is the big one, all right, if Ecclestone and Mosley don't back down. And they never have before.

To FOTA, this is some hybrid of the last straw and the perfect excuse to pounce. It's been no secret for a decade that the big European manufacturers, especially the Germans, believe they could run F1 far better than Mosley does and make vastly more money without Ecclestone's notorious raking in of personal profits.

This time, the teams are calling out the kingpins: "The FIA [Mosley] and the commercial rights holder [Ecclestone] have campaigned to divide FOTA," the statement read. The implication: This time, no way.

"These teams … have no alternative other than to commence the preparation for a new championship which reflects the values of its participants and partners," the statement continued.

In other words, Mosley and Ecclestone aren't going to force a junk division into the world's most sophisticated form of motor racing. A $60 million cap would have done that -- let upstart teams come in with technological leeway over the established, higher-spending teams.

"This series will have transparent governance," the statement read, another slap at the old regime.

Mosley, of course, has been under fire from the teams on a separate issue, last year's release by a London tabloid of video of him in an escapade with prostitutes in a Chelsea "dungeon." Teams called for his resignation, but he has refused.

Now, all the winds of war have gathered from every corner: the long-running resentment of Ecclestone's power -- "tens of millions of dollars have been withheld from many teams by the commercial rights holder [Ecclestone], going back as far as 2006," the FOTA statement charged … the disgust with Mosley's rule-making, his arrogance and his scandal … and now the junk-racing, low-budget retreat the two old bosses want F1 to enter into.

There might not be all-out war in F1. But the only chance of avoiding it now, it surely seems, would be if Mosley and Ecclestone heard and obeyed that ancient British admonition, delivered first by Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament and again at the precipice of World War II by Leo Amery to disgraced Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go."

Methinks that this time, icy Englishman Ron Dennis of McLaren would be an excellent choice to deliver it to Mosley and Ecclestone.

BROOKLYN, Mich. -- Once-mighty Detroit lies little more than an hour's drive to the east. And so time was when the garage area at Michigan International Speedway teemed on race weekends with bigwigs who'd cruised over from Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.

The grandstands were packed with factory workers cheering for the brands they built on the assembly lines over at Dearborn, Warren, Auburn Hills, even Flint in its long-past day, and the plants just across the Canadian border in Windsor, Ontario.

It's less crowded around here now. Not that it's a ghost town. Just subdued. You can feel the pall.

The only cheerful, omnipresent manufacturer figure is Lee White, the chieftain of Toyota Racing Development.

Just the Ford presence alone was a festival all its own, and I wonder about old acquaintances long gone to the buyouts, the early retirements …

Ford's favorite racing son, the self-made engineer Jack Roush, headquartered in nearby Livonia, always made sure they had something to feel good about.

Eleven times his cars have won here, because Roush focuses his efforts here like no place else.

But this time, Roush's highest-starting driver for Sunday's LifeLock 400 is Matt Kenseth in 16th. Greg Biffle will start 20th, David Ragan 23rd, Carl Edwards 29th and Jamie McMurray 31st.

Kenseth is the only winner this year among them, with his rain-aided victory in the Daytona 500 followed by a fully earned one at Fontana, Calif.

Edwards, the most baffling disappointment this year, not just at Roush but on the whole Sprint Cup tour -- his nine wins last year led to his being named as consensus pick to win the 2009 Cup -- probably has the best chance to renew the Roush tradition at MIS.

Despite his poor starting spot, "This place is an easy place to pass if you've got a fast race car," Edwards said.

Off pace as the Roush Fenway team has been this year, Ford is in the best shape -- or, you could say, the least bad shape -- of the three American-based manufacturers.

"I don't understand everything that's going on with all the money in the country, but what I do know is that Ford is standing on its own feet," Edwards said.

Not so with Chrysler and GM, both of whom are subsisting now on a combination of bankruptcy and government bailouts.

The primary news story of the weekend here has been GM's announcement of NASCAR-wide cuts in cash support for teams. That includes cutting off cash from Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s JR Motorsports, which fields Nationwide cars, and Kevin Harvick Inc., which fields vehicles in the Nationwide and Camping World Truck series.

And the cash flow from GM continues in Cup only to the top teams, Hendrick Motorsports, Stewart-Haas Racing and Richard Childress Racing.

As long as technical support continues -- and Earnhardt believes that it will -- then the cash cuts may be of little real significance. Earnhardt characterized the GM contribution to his Nationwide team's budget as "very small."

His sister, Kelley Earnhardt, released a statement that JR Motorsports shouldn't have much difficulty adjusting to the GM cash cutbacks.

And that's true NASCAR-wide. Manufacturer money has never been as big as the public and some media people assumed. An educated guess would be perhaps 10 percent, tops, of big teams' budgets.

But two Toyotas occupy the front row here, driven by Brian Vickers and Kyle Busch, and three of the top four positions counting David Reutimann. The only Chevrolet, and the only American-based brand, in the two front rows is Jimmie Johnson's No. 48 Chevrolet, starting third.

So NASCAR goes on, at a reasonably good pace, all economic factors considered.

It's just that I-94, the main artery out here from once-mighty Detroit, is no longer pumping as vibrantly with traffic of moguls and workers, all of them fans, to the home track of the American automobile industry.

DOVER, Del. -- NASCAR's sky will not fall with the bankruptcy of General Motors, any more than it has fallen with the bankruptcy of Chrysler -- which continues to race its Dodge brand.

To be sure, there's enough information out to set the Chicken Littles scurrying around the newsrooms.

But that very information is what assures me that GM's racing brand of choice, Chevrolet, will go on in NASCAR.

News agencies are reporting that GM will file for bankruptcy at 8 a.m. ET Monday, and that shortly thereafter, President Barack Obama will tell the nation that the United States government is taking a 60 percent stake in GM, with the Canadian government taking 12.5 percent, the United Auto Workers healthcare trust 17.5 percent, and bondholders 10 percent.

That pretty much wipes out GM as we've known it.

But it also assures that GM and Chevrolet as brands will go on, whoever owns them.

The U.S. and Canadian governments aren't going to let GM go under, because too many American and Canadian jobs would be lost. That would devastate North American society far worse than just messing up a sport like NASCAR.

And as long as GM is a brand, it will race. It can't afford not to, any more than Chrysler could afford not to.

Through three different Chrysler financial phases, Dodges have continued to race -- under DaimlerChrysler, then under private investment when Daimler-Benz retrenched to Mercedes-Benz as its core business, and now in bankruptcy restructuring.

Still, just to be sure, I bombarded the biggest Chevrolet racer in the history of NASCAR, team owner Rick Hendrick, with doomsday scenarios Sunday night after one of his Impalas, driven by Jimmie Johnson, had won the Autism Speaks 400.

What if the government should tell GM it must withdraw from promotional spending in NASCAR?

"What if GM tells you, 'Rick, we can't give you another penny for the foreseeable future?' Do you have a Plan B?" I asked.

What I meant was, Hendrick is powerful enough -- just as a retail car dealer, let alone a racer -- to make a deal with Toyota, Dodge or Ford, the other three NASCAR competitors, anytime he wants to.

Hell, the guy could race Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs or Hondas if NASCAR rules were conducive to it. He's got that many dealerships for those brands.

He looked me in the eye, and he said, "My Plan A is Chevrolet. My Plan B is Chevrolet. And my Plan C is Chevrolet."

No one in NASCAR has higher or closer connections with GM than Hendrick, though he never flaunts them. He's been dining privately with GM chairmen and CEOs since the days of Roger Smith. That's more than 20 years.

"I've had no indication they're going to cut back," Hendrick said of GM's NASCAR operations.

As Hendrick understands it, "there's a plan, a get-in, get-out situation," Hendrick said. "I'm hoping that if it happens, they'll get in and get out [of bankruptcy] in a hurry."

Hendrick pointed out that the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has affected all manufacturers in NASCAR, and "you see Ford and Toyota and Chrysler, everybody's [still] here."

That's because they have to be. The situation has grown far graver than the old "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" line. If you want to sell American cars at all on Monday, you have to race them on Sunday. That's the only real appeal you have left.

The brands with which Chevrolet has to compete in the showrooms -- Dodge, Ford and Toyota -- are still here. So GM must stay.

The fears of the government pulling the plug on NASCAR began with the inimitable Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, questioning whether bailed-out companies should be spending government money on sports promotions.

But there's a vast difference between having "Chevrolet" or "Ford" signage at a golf tournament or a baseball game, and participating in the very endeavor you sell: automobile performance.

Stopping the manufacturers from participating in NASCAR would be like telling Titleist, Callaway, Taylor and Ping that they can no longer support PGA or LPGA players.

The government, no matter how recalcitrant, will have no choice but to understand that if GM wants to sell cars, it must race.

"The numbers are really clear that NASCAR, almost more than anything else, drives sales for GM and the other manufacturers," said NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston. "It's one of the things that works better than anything else for them to gain exposure and sell cars. They're reaching over 100,000 fans in person at the track, and an average of almost 9 million fans on television every weekend."

At manufacturer bankruptcy, "We have a little experience," Poston said. "Obviously Chrysler is going through restructuring of their own, and they continue to put their resources, and compete, and market, through NASCAR."

From 1971 to 1980, NASCAR ran with virtually no factory support for teams -- just a little "out the backdoor" sheet metal and a few engine parts. NASCAR did fine that decade.

And so far, NASCAR isn't even at the brink of complete withdrawal of factory support.

So on Monday morning, the sky may be grayer, but it isn't even close to falling.

DOVER, Del. -- It's fun to watch guys fly in under the radar.

While we in the NASCAR media corps were obsessing on Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s crew chief switch, and Kyle Busch's shots at the move, David Reutimann quietly took the first step toward showing his win in the Coca-Cola 600 last week wasn't a fluke.

Winning the pole for the very next race, Sunday's Autism Speaks 400, is by no means a guarantee that Reutimann can fulfill the hope he immediately expressed after being declared the winner at rain-slogged Charlotte: "Maybe next time, we'll earn it."

Indeed, only 11 times in 78 races at Dover International Speedway has the pole-sitter won the race.

But, mean as the Monster Mile is -- you can come off a corner, see a car turned sideways and slam it, all in one blink of the eyes because there's just no room here -- it can be kind to an underdog.

And it can help that kind of guy prove a point.

In 1990, Derrike Cope came here with a flying fluke under his belt that season. He'd won the Daytona 500 on the last lap, slipping past the fishtailing car of Dale Earnhardt the moment a tire shredded on the notorious black No. 3.

Even after Cope won, Earnhardt was the big story, because he'd dominated the race. From there, Earnhardt's mantra became famous: "It ain't the Daytona 499."

Finally Cope came here and won, and the fluke talk eased a bit, for nobody thinks this is an easy place to get cheap wins.

Reutimann had it tough from the minute he arrived here Friday morning. Maybe I'm the one who made him nervous from the outset.

Amid the Earnhardt upheaval, I couldn't resist asking the good-humored Reutimann, "If for some reason this winning streak should not continue for you, do you have any fears that your car owner [the equally jovial Michael Waltrip] might change crew chiefs on you?"

The media center broke out in laughter, except for Reutimann, who, very oddly for him, could manage only a nervous smile.

"I hope not," he said. "I think Rodney [Childers] and I have got a pretty good program going, and I'd hate to do anything to mess it up."

Now you could see what was happening. The usually glib, no-worries Reutimann had his first Cup win, and it had been sinking in all week so that he knew what it feels like.

And so here was the 39-year-old journeyman who'd labored happily on the short tracks most of his life, and now he'd reached a new level and was fearful of falling from it.

The one-line artist showed signs of becoming another politically correct Cup driver.

"Not that I couldn't work with Bootie Barker," Reutimann hastened to add, in deference to Waltrip's own crew chief. "But I would fight awful hard to keep Rodney Childers as my crew chief. I don't want him to go anywhere."

Now Reutimann was all in an anxious knot over the power of suggestion.

"Oh, man, I hadn't even thought about it. I wish you hadn't said anything," he said to me.

"You know he was just kidding," said a bystander.

"Yeah -- but I don't know," Reutimann said.

Reutimann recovered fast from that one, after somebody asked him about talk that Martin Truex Jr. might be his next teammate at Michael Waltrip Racing.

What would Reutimann say to Truex to convince him he should come to MWR? That the team is a budding power?

Reutimann thought a moment.

"I'm there."

That broke up the room. The one-line artist was back. After the laughter died down, he said, "I even managed to get that one out with a straight face."

This was the guy who had spent the early season creating mirth with his ironic self-deprecation as "The Franchise" after a team member had nicknamed the then-winless driver that.

But then came more anxiety. He went out early in qualifying Friday, and made his family proud of their three-generations-old No. 00 ("double nothing," is the inside family joke) again -- this time with a lap around the Monster Mile at 156.794 mph.

Then, just as he'd had to pace the pit road for two hours at Charlotte waiting to see if NASCAR would call the race with him sitting at the front of the parked field, Reutimann had to wait ... and wait ... and wait ... to see if someone would better his qualifying speed.

"I'm kind of a nervous person anyway," he said when the pole was finally his. "Waiting around for them to decide if we won the race, and then waiting around all day so everybody had a shot at us to try to knock us off the pole, kind of becomes nerve-wracking over time.

"But in the end," he said of qualifying, "we had a good car."

What about his Toyota in race trim? "It's really good."

Maybe last week is showing a little bit here for the 00 team, in that "I think it gives the shop a little momentum, because those guys work so hard on everything.

"For me, I would like to win a race a little differently than that," he said of Charlotte.

Maybe he can, here Sunday on a monstrous place to try to win, and 00 can go from meaning double-nothing to double-wins.

CONCORD, N.C. -- Well, the good news is, the Coca-Cola 600 is going to a true Memorial Day running. Just this once.

After an early Sunday evening of pretty blatant lollygagging under intermittent showers, NASCAR decided not to even try to start the thing until noon ET on Monday.

You could tell, early on, that they had little to no hope.

Funny. You hang around these rain delays and rainouts for enough decades, you learn to sense NASCAR's biorhythms -- whether they're going to try to run, or are just going through the motions before they call it.

It started raining here at 6:06 p.m. ET Sunday evening, and by 6:30 I sensed a whole lot of going through the motions, even after it stopped raining. They knew what the radar looked like.

There just was no spring in anybody's step along the pit road, no sense of urgency anywhere at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

One high official told me before 7 p.m. that they'd be very unlikely to attempt a start if there was any rain after 8 p.m. -- it was sprinkling again at that hour -- because it would put them at a 11 p.m. start, and they weren't going to do that.

Darn. I've always liked to see these night races go late, just to see how absurd they can get.

In 1997, the North Carolina Highway Patrol had to step in after midnight and call off the 600, lest the outbound traffic get mingled with Charlotte's snarling regular morning traffic.

At 12:20 a.m., only 265 of the full 400 laps had been completed. So NASCAR announced that at 12:45, they'd give the field the 20-to-go signal, and let 'em scramble for it.

Jeff Gordon won it, got to the winner's interview around 2 a.m. and then, everybody's night's sleep shot anyway, hung out and talked with us until nearly 3.

That 1 a.m. finish was the record folly for night racing for TV's sake, running into the rainstorm hours, until the July race at Daytona in 2005.

That was a masterpiece. The thing ended around 2 a.m. And this was a race that, when founded as the Firecracker 400 by Big Bill France, originally started at 10 a.m. specifically to avoid the afternoon and evening thunderstorms of summertime Florida.

Tony Stewart won the '05 Pepsi 400 six hours after the scheduled start -- and 16 hours after the time Big Bill knew the race should start.

Maybe it's my decades of covering 24-hour races that make me take these NASCAR situations far less seriously than my U.S.-bound colleagues in the media do. Wee hours spent at racetracks long ago became mundane to me.

I think it was in 1995 at Le Mans when it rained for about 23 of the hours -- although, to their credit, sports car endurance races run right on through the rain. Which goes a long way toward helping you stay awake.

But there was just no fun to be had Sunday evening here. Give NASCAR credit for wising up since '05 at Daytona, off the '97 blunder of the marathon race here.

Now, NASCAR's policy is never to start what it knows it can't finish. And the radar in the Charlotte area showed just too many little cells, moving and combining.

Lowe's officials' handling of the announcement to the fans was a throwback to the dirt track days. It was, in itself, fascinating to hear.

They got the golden-voiced Ken Squier, CBS's longtime Shakespearian soliloquy deliverer of NASCAR, to lament the "dark, rainy night" and introduce track president Marcus Smith, who began by telling the fans, "Y'all are so fantastic …"

The fans booed anyway.

But they went away orderly.

Because NASCAR had done the right thing this time.