I just watched a really long race. Everything that could go wrong went wrong.
Jeremy Mayfield ran away with the first hundred or so laps and then hit the wall. Trashed the car.
And it rained. More than once. They spent two hours drying the track.
There were a bunch of other wrecks and some blown engines.
The broadcast booth lost power and there was no naration from one wad of commercials to the next. You could see the cars out there going around and even hear them, but nobody was saying a word.
After a while they got the microphones working but they didn't have any monitors and the computers were out of whack. I don't know how they kept up with the scoring.
Then they raced a while, had another wreck and the sky opened up and ended the race under caution. It was also getting dark.
The whole thing took over six hours.
In the end, Bobby LaBonte won the Southern 500 and he didn't even have a fast car. His pitstops were faster than anybody else's and when you have that many cautions, a few seconds per pit stop can really add up.
He got out of the car in a pouring rain, but he grinned a lot.
I'm used to races at Darlington being much more exciting.
Howard