Stewart's mouth, fans' frustrations cast dark shadow over NASCAR, while Chevy reigns surpreme

TALLADEGA -- The three biggest storylines of the first quarter of the NASCAR season converged in the Aaron's 499 on Sunday like a bumper-bending slam-draft, then left Talladega Superspeedway with all the momentum of a car taking the lead.

Five days before the race, driver Tony Stewart accused NASCAR officials of "playing God," saying they called for phony caution periods to shape races. What happened at Talladega? The yellow flag came out just after superstar Jeff Gordon made the race's final pass into the lead.

Through the first eight races of the season, Chevrolet, and in particular Hendrick Motorsports, had dominated the Nextel Cup Series. What happened at Talladega? Jeff Gordon won in a Hendrick car, with teammate Jimmie Johnson taking second.

Bad behavior by fans became a sore subject when Jeff Gordon's car was pelted with cans after his victory at Phoenix in the previous race. What happened at Talladega? Jeff Gordon's car was pelted with cans after he won at Talladega.

Tony Stewart backed off his comments comparing NASCAR to professional wrestling after meeting with top administrators and being fined $10,000 (not, a NASCAR official said, for criticizing the organization, but for skipping a press conference). Tony Stewart said he no longer believed that NASCAR threw cautions for non-existent debris on the track.

Driver Jeff Burton said the bigger picture is the issue of the sport's integrity.

"Certainly, one of the things that our sport has to have is credibility," Jeff Burton said. "When the fans watch the races, they have to know that NASCAR doesn't have an interest in one particular team. And anytime there is a hint of that, I don't think it's good for the sport, although this sport has to be willing to talk about the issues that people are talking about. I've watched shows where they'll come right out and say, 'If we can find a (piece of debris), we're going to show it to you.' Tony didn't start that conversation."

In a sport with as many moving parts, gray areas and judgment calls as NASCAR, that perception has been around a long time.

"The thing in all of this that drives me kind of crazy is any belief by teams or fans that NASCAR does something to help a particular team," Jeff Burton said. "That drives me whacko. I'd quit if I believed that's where we are. I'd just have to quit. I don't believe they'd throw a caution so Jeff Gordon could win."

The Aaron's 499 did nothing to dissuade the conspiracy theorists, though. For example, bad-boy Tony Stewart pitted while leading the race on Lap 40 and got hit with a penalty for entering pit road faster than the 55 mph limit. That'll teach him, right? But, Tony Stewart said, he was going too fast.

"I can promise you I was probably 10 miles per hour over the speed limit when I came in," he said. "I was 1,000 revs over what I was supposed to be. I just hadn't practiced it all weekend, and I thought I was going to be all right."

Jeff Gordon won Sunday's race, which ended under caution. He made his final move to the lead at an opportune time.

In the tri-oval on the 184th lap, David Reutimann's No. 00 Toyota suddenly started imitating a mosquito-fogging truck, giving up its engine with billowing smoke and a sheen of oil. A quarter of a lap later, Jeff Gordon slipped past race leader Jamie McMurray between Turns 1 and 2, and the caution came out.

The six laps that it took to clean up Reutimann's mess pushed the race past its scheduled conclusion, prompting an attempt at a green-white-checkered finish. But since NASCAR allows only one of these two-lap shootouts, Jeff Gordon never had to defend his lead, because by the time the cars were coming out of Turn 2 after the restart, multiple wrecks among the pursuers brought the race to a quick end.

"All I know is I was leading when the caution came out," Jeff Gordon said. "I didn't know what happened or when it happened or when the caution should have been thrown.

"I can tell you that if NASCAR was ever going to fix things or lean in any direction, you'd think they would lean toward the majority."

The majority, in this case, would be Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans. But the Talladega track favorite said Jeff Gordon was the race winner fair and square.

"They don't always fall like you'd like them to," Earnhardt Jr. said. "We run the race as best we can run it. It's a poker game out there. You get a good hand; you get a bad hand. You get several good ones and several bad ones throughout the race, and you hope you get a good one at the end.

"We didn't get cheated out of a chance to win. The cautions just didn't work out for us. We didn't have the car to get it done in the first place."

Jeff Gordon's second victory of the season gives him a whopping 203-point lead in the season standings over the second-place Jeff Burton -- and he's not even the biggest winner on his team. Johnson has three victories. Add in Kyle Busch's win at Bristol, and Hendrick Motorsports has six wins in nine races this season, making it the heaviest hitter in Chevrolet's dominant lineup.

Matt Kenseth, in a Ford, is the only non-Chevy winner this season. Seven of the top nine drivers in the standings drive Chevrolets. Hendrick's Jeff Gordon, Johnson and Kyle Busch all rank in the top eight.

Jeff Gordon and Johnson's one-two finish at Talladega was the third for Hendrick cars this season.

"It's been a heck of a year," team owner Rick Hendrick said, "and you enjoy it while you can because you know a lot of these races we probably shouldn't have won. But we did. ... I just kind of wish we had the momentum in the last 10 (races) rather than the first 10."

Jeff Gordon's strong start toward his fifth season championship has made a lot of fans happy. Surveys consistently show him as NASCAR's second-most popular driver, behind Earnhardt Jr. But surveys also usually show that Jeff Gordon is NASCAR's most disliked driver, too, hearkening back to the time when Dale Earnhardt was NASCAR's most popular and most disliked driver at the same time.

Many old-line Earnhardt fans seem to have a particular disdain for Jeff Gordon, perhaps for stealing some of the Intimidator's thunder when he hit NASCAR as a didn't-pay-his-dues phenom in the 1990s.

Now, Jeff Gordon's fruitful career has pulled his abreast of some of Earnhardt's career marks. Last week, Jeff Gordon tied Earnhardt on NASCAR's career victory list with 76. He sought to honor Earnhardt by flying a No. 3 flag on his Victory Lap. But some Phoenix fans responded by hurling cans out of the stands at Jeff Gordon's car.

Earnhardt won a track-record 10 Cup races at Talladega, and his son has inherited his late father's immense support at the Alabama track. In the balance of stock-car fandom, that has meant Jeff Gordon and, by extension, his protg Johnson don't get much love there.

"The majority of the fans out there, especially here, are huge Earnhardt fans, or just not Jeff Gordon fans or Hendrick Motorsports fans, for that matter," Jeff Gordon said.

Mindful of that and in the wake of the Phoenix outburst, the week leading up to Sunday's race was filled with driver appeals and official warnings for the fans to behave regardless of the outcome. After all, Talladega is where the grandstand fans rained cans on Jeff Gordon's car after he won the 2004 Aaron's 499 under caution over Earnhardt Jr.

Jeff Foxworthy, of "You might be a redneck ..." fame, served as the race's grand marshal.

"If I stayed here for two days," Foxworthy said before the race, "I'd never have to do any more research for the rest of my life."

You might think that Talladega fans would be accustomed to seeing Jeff Gordon win: His victory on Sunday was his fifth at the track. It also was the 77th of his career, moving him ahead of Earnhardt. So despite the track president's promise to jail anyone who threw anything at the track, some fans in the crowd of 160,000 did just that as the final caution lap was run and when Jeff Gordon attempted an aborted celebratory burnout.

"It was real disappointing at the end to see how some of the fans were acting," Kenseth said. "It's disappointing to have your $150,000 racecar being pelted with full beer cans at the end of the race.

That leaves NASCAR going to Richmond for Saturday night's race on a two-week streak of bad behavior from Cup fans.

"It's very unfortunate that a few unruly fans can ruin things for a lot of people," said Jim Hunter, NASCAR's vice president of corporate communications. "The track put a lot of effort into preventing this type of behavior. Our fans are passionate, but this type of behavior doesn't represent a majority of our fans."

After Sunday's race, a track official announced that "less than 10 people were detained" in the crackdown.

If Jeff Gordon's success has become a lightning rod for bad behavior, then NASCAR would appear to have an ongoing problem, since the four-time series champion said he might be off to the best start of his career.

"I don't know what you do," Hendrick said. "It is dangerous. The drivers and NASCAR have talked about it."

Even an appeal from Earnhardt Jr. fell on deaf ears. He asked fans to throw toilet paper if they had to throw something at the track. On Sunday, one lonely roll lay on the infield beside the tri-oval as small streams from ruptured beer cans trickled down the track toward it.

"It don't look like it's something you can control," Earnhardt Jr. said.

See more at www.al.com