Matt Kenseth—who started dead last in his back up car—was the driver in the lead when the race was red flagged on lap 152, so he gets his first victory in over a year. It's not Matt's fault that it was dark, wet, and everyone involved was just about fed up. Maybe if they hadn't started the festivities at 3:30 p.m. they could have stuck it out a little longer; and maybe if the best car in the race didn't get carried out on a stretcher fans and drivers wouldn't be quite so grumpy today.

Most of the anger is in response to the wreck on Lap 124 that took out eight cars including Kyle Busch, who had already led 88 laps and who everyone agreed was having the best run of the day. Dale Earnhardt Jr. was already a lap down when he clipped Brian Vickers on an aborted pass attempt and sent Vickers flying into Busch. This was after Earnhardt missed his pit box—twice—so it's safe to say that he was having a bad day. Of course, he doesn't think any of that was his fault, even though no one else seems to agree:

"I guess they're not going to penalize (Earnhardt) for it," Vickers said. "It's kind of sad. To wreck somebody intentionally like that in front of the entire field is really kind of dangerous..."

Earnhardt was livid when told that Vickers thought he did something wrong or intentional.

"Penalize me? For what?" Earnhardt asked. "I got ran in to and sent below the line. What the hell? I don't want to go down there, I got sent down there. What the hell am I supposed to do? Stay down there? No. I got to get back on the race track. If he wasn't so damn reckless, we would have never had that problem."

Busch was also unimpressed.

It's unfortunate that a guy that's messed up his whole day on pit road and screwed up, that he has to make our day worse," Busch said. "It wasn't our problem that he was a lap down and fighting with another lapped car. I was frustrated going into this race (after finishing second in both the truck series and Nationwide race). This is about a 15 on a scale of 10."

So I guess Dale is not invited to the picnic next weekend?

Kenseth wins rain-shortened Daytona 500 [Sporting News]
Daytona 500 a debacle after golden boy's bratty move [Chicago Tribune]
Fans, viewers cheated as rain ruins Daytona 500 [Jackson Citizen Patriot]
Earnhardt's wild day leads to multi-car melee [Daily Sun]
Logano, 18, greeted by Cup's harsh reality [USA Today]

Here's all you need to know about this weekend's Daytona 500, the race that kicks off the 2008 NASCAR season: everything's a competition. Everything.

The obvious battle is between the drivers on the track, but you've also got competing models of cars (Ford, Chevy, Dodge, and now Toyota), racing teams (the Dream Team-esque Hendrick Motorsports, the nobody-respects-us Joe Gibbs Racing squad, and more), sponsors (far too many to name), nationalities (American vs. them foreign open-wheel racing vets), and on and on. Everything's a battle; the prerace buildup has included the "Budweiser Shootout" and the "Gatorade Duels." (The "LifetimeTV Bitchslap" is scheduled for next year.)

So it's no wonder NASCAR fans spend a significant percentage of their lives drunk. You'd drink, too, if you had to keep up with this many rooting interests.

NASCAR stokes this competitive frenzy, with an ability to manipulate storylines and manufacture controversy that leaves both ESPN and third-world warlords drooling with envy. Here are some of the key plot threads unspooling at Daytona:

• Dale Earnhardt Junior's new home. Junior spent most of last season in an ugly fight with his stepmother for control of the racing company that bears his father's name, and ended up losing. So he jumped over to Hendrick Motorsports, where he'll race alongside Jimmie Johnson (two-time defending champion) and metrosexual (for NASCAR, anyway) Jeff Gordon. Imagine the media slobbering that would go on if Brett Favre joined the Patriots, and you'll have an idea of what's happening here. Junior's already won two preliminary events, leading NASCAR conspiracy theorists—a term that's almost a redundancy—to scream that the fix is in.

• The rise of Toyota. NASCAR has opened the door to non-U.S. auto manufacturers to race, and there are suspicions that NASCAR is artificially shaping races to ensure that the Toyota grabs its fair share of visibility. Naturally, this has led the xenophobic contingent of the fanbase to pine for the good ol' days, when races were just American cars made overseas, instead of foreign cars made here in America.

• Step aside, Gramps. NASCAR's unique in that it lets its aged competitors still try out for a slot on the main stage instead of just shuffling them off to chuckle in overstuffed pregame studios. But watching Sterling Marlin and Bill Elliott try to race with the younger cats still gives you that same queasy feeling like when a clearly-in-decline Michael Jordan was getting smoked by the likes of Allen Iverson. Still, one old codger, Dale Jarrett, actually made the Daytona field of 43 this year. Look for him to clog up the track as he putters along, leaning forward over his steering wheel and squinting to see if this is his turn.

• Act up, and NASCAR will kill you. Whatever NASCAR does to keep its drivers in line, Scientology-style, it's working. Consider the little dustup last Friday between cranky dork Kurt Busch and split-personality sociopath Tony Stewart. Stewart's car bumped Busch's on the track, Busch tried to mow down Stewart along pit road, and then—allegedly—Stewart punched Busch in the face during a closed-door meeting with NASCAR officials. Whatever they were told after that, both of them turned meeker than lambs, and it wasn't as a result of the announced meager six-race probation.

Daytona is billed as the "Super Bowl of NASCAR," and Fox, predictably enough, is padding its coverage with hours of prerace fluff and in-race gimmickry. And, like this year's Super Bowl, it's probably going to be a hell of a race even without network and NASCAR goosing.

The Daytona proper starts at 3:30 and will run until after 7. But if the idea of that many domestic beers, fried pickle dogs, and southern accents scares you, tune in for the last half-hour. If nothing else, you can gape at the insanely hot drivers' wives. Plus, there's a damn good chance you'll see a serious wreck, and who doesn't love watching car wrecks? Terrorists, that's who.

And in closing, I wanna thank Deadspin and Yahoo! Sports for getting me here and making this dream a reality. We did it, y'all! WHOOOOOO!!!!!

Jay Busbee is the current editor of Yahoo! Sports' NASCAR blog From the Marbles. He also created and edits the Atlanta sports site Right Down Peachtree and the southern sports site Sports Gone South, hitting the rare triple-dork blog trifecta.

***

A white woman behind me is rocing a Tupac t-shirt. Seriously. I wanna bone.

The two best words to describe this experience are loud and cold. And my man Juan Pablos is in next to last place. Fuckin' Juan Pablo. Vamanos.

Here's how it works here. It's loud as fuck, and then you see cars drive by for 11 seconds, and then you watch the big screen. My dad told me to get earplugs, but the people here told me if I did, I was a pussy. Also, because of my Toyota hat, I'm "a fag."

Meanwhile, I had to leave my seat to go buy a sweatshirt. I stopped in the rest room, and there was a dude in there who wouldn't go in the trough because he didn't want other dudes looking at him. "There may be deviants in here," he says. There are, pal. I promise you.

Luke used to be a dangerous man... if I had sent him five years ago, he'd have started the day with a bottle of breakfast Beam, made best friends with some hearty southerners, slept with a 45-year-old Tony Stewart groupie, gotten a rebel flag tattoo, and then cried himself to sleep because no one loves him.

But that was then, and this is now. Luke is married now, and took his wife Ann with him to the race. Anyway, Luke actually ended up winning a trip to the race on a radio show this week, he flew down to Daytona this morning, and has been filing intermittent reports via Blackberry. His first report can be found by clicking that pretty little link below.

5:45 am, Dulles airport. Free Southwest tickets to Orlando, bus ride to Daytona Beach, and free tickets to the Daytona 500. All courtesy of The Junkies.

It's an interesting group of people headed down to sunny F-L-A. The wife is sporting her newly acquired Greg Biffle hat. I currently have no gear, but you can bet the Toyota gear is getting purchased (I advised him to get a Karate Kid headband, with the big red sun in the middle)... and some redneck is gonna punch me in the kidney.

We've become acquainted with our fellow contest winners. There's a couple of middle-aged Dale Jr. fans, a younger yuppie couple (the wife definitely likes to complain). And there are two young bucks, who apparently got jumped and mugged in downtown Orlando last night. One dude, head to toe in Tony Stewart gear, bleeds spontaneously and profusely from his hands, completely unprovoked.

We've got a 2 hour car ride from Orlando to Daytona. Andrea, our van driver, is not a fan of me drinking in the car. The bloody fighting guy doesn't like it, either. They don't have a chance.

The older couple are questioning Andrea constantly about when we'll get there. And they're not fans of foreigners. I overhear this conversation.

Guy: "There ain't no black NASCAR drivers."
Old man: "Cause they won't let any of them even in the building."

Meanwhile, the young yuppie couple. Well, she set them free in a tank top. She's packing planets.

I've never been in a more uncomfortable place. It's fucking cold.

But, that said, the Daytona 500 is a major thing to a lot of sports fans, and if I'm going to pretend that you care about Arena Football, then I probably can't ignore that some of you care about car racing. So, since I can't help you, here are a few blogs that probably can:

The Diecast Dude
He's a NASCAR fan and a Raiders fan, so I'm sorry, we can't friends. But I can admire his well-respect NASCAR blog.

The Church of the Great Oval
Includes today's horoscopes for some of the prominent drivers, and how it might affect their chances. Brilliant work.

FastMachines.com
Appears to be frequently updated and well-designed.

Kathy's Pit Stop
Kathy really loves her racin'.