SURFERS PARADISE, Australia -- In 1997, at this race, CART officials managed to do something unimaginable. They threw the white flag on consecutive laps because the timed distance had been miscalculated but caught a break because leader Scott Pruett didn't let it affect him or the outcome.

Those two white flags didn't give CART a black eye but the beleaguered sanctioning body couldn't dodge a self-inflicted haymaker here Sunday afternoon at the annual Honda Indy 300.

A new group of CART officials, possibly suffering from water on the brain due to several hours of heavy rains, arbitrarily decided to stop a race that really never got started -- leaving most competitors fuming and confused, or both.

Mario Dominguez will be credited with a victory in the CART record book but, trust me, there were no winners in this embarrassing mess.

It was a soggy, shameful example of how not to handle a difficult situation and one of the reasons why manufacturers like Honda and Toyota are leaving CART at the end of 2002.

To be fair, CART officials were placed in a no-win situation for the teams and 103,000 fans because the first rains in months reduced the 2.7-mile street circuit into a treacherous track with little or no visibility for the drivers.

That contributed directly to the aborted start when nine cars crashed, sending Tora Takagi and Adrian Fernandez to the hospital and bringing out the first red flag of the afternoon.

"It was totally crazy out there and none of us could see a thing," said veteran Christian Fittipaldi, one of the best wet weather performers in champ cars. "We should have never started under those conditions because the visibility was zero."

With no possibility of stopping and just waiting on the next clear day (the city of Surfers Paradise had to have its streets back by Monday morning), CART had to try and get some kind of show going.

And there were actually six laps of green flag racing before the rains returned and forced drivers to slow behind the pace car on Lap 10. At that point nobody knew for sure the track would never be dry enough to resume racing, but they did know CART had already determined the distance would be 50 laps (instead of 70) and that 36 laps would constitute an official race.

	Andretti might have been robbed of a win in the rain.

"We were never told the race would only go 36 laps but it made sense that if it kept raining and the track kept getting worse then it would only go 36 laps before CART called it," said owner Morris Nunn.

The teams of Michael Andretti, Fittipaldi, Jimmy Vasser, Michel Jourdain and Shinji Nakano figured on that logic. They hadn't pitted with most of the leaders on Lap 10. Andretti and Fittipaldi came in on Lap 16, while Vasser, Jourdain and Nakano stopped on lap 17. (CART's new rules make it mandatory to pit at certain intervals, depending on the race distance, and it was every 20 laps here Sunday).

"It wasn't a race it was all roulette at that point," said Scott Roembke, the team manager for Vasser and Jourdain. "A lot of us thought it might be ending on lap 36 and you saw a lot of guys waiting to pit between laps 15-20. The Herdez team (Dominguez) guessed right."

Added Kim Green, co-owner of Andretti's car: "CART made it clear after the restart the race would be 36 laps so we played our strategy accordingly. We felt like we won but CART obviously decided something different and it's the worst officiating I've ever seen."

Several of Green's crew felt CART deliberately decided to go from 36 to 40 laps to make Andretti pit again and prevent its all-time winner from going to Victory Lane because he's taking Team Green to the rival Indy Racing League next year.

"Any insinuation that we did something wrong to Michael because he's going to another series is ludicrous," said CART chief steward Chris Kneifel. "No matter what lap we picked to stop the race we could not make everyone happy but it's not our job to worry about who we please.

"We made every attempt to make a decision based on integrity and fair play."

And while everybody knows Kneifel and Gary Barnard, manager of competition, are passionate about CART and way above any predetermined retribution, their reasoning for allowing the race to go 40 laps instead of 36 just isn't plausible.

John Lopes, CART's president of competition, claimed the stewards didn't want to "play God" and determine the winner so they opted for the criteria that the race wouldn't be called until every driver had made at least two pit stops.

But, when the cars are chugging around the pace car at 55 mph for an hour and there is no pretense of racing, it is irrelevant how many pit stops are made. Who cares if Andretti or Vasser only stopped once during the monsoon? The fans were long gone by that point and CART's only goal should have been to end the race ASAP -- which would have been Lap 36.

Instead, Dominguez, the slowest qualifier who crashed endlessly over the weekend, was inadvertently rewarded for making four pit stops in the race. Sure, people felt good for the Herdez squad because they had been trying to win a race since the late Tony Bettenhausen started the team in 1988.

But, to be honest, it will be a joke to the world of motorsports because the personable Dominguez simply appears out of place in a champ car -- let alone spraying champagne on the victory podium.

His celebration was nearly as embarrassing as this dreary chapter in CART's history.