When winner is bothered, something clearly wrong

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Fans will talk about it on message boards. Television will replay it incessantly. The last lap finish between Kyle Busch and Tony Stewart, with Busch climbing from a destroyed car after heavy contact with the outside wall a few hundred yards from the finish line in Saturday night's Coke Zero 400, was nearly an instant replay of the one four months earlier at Talladega involving Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski.

Last-lap drama

Tony Stewart and Kyle Busch were teammates last year but that bond was out the window racing for the checkered flag at Daytona. While Stewart celebrated, Busch left fuming.

• Final Laps: Daytona
• Victory Lane: Daytona
• Post-race reactions
• Press Pass: T. Stewart

The 100,000 or so in attendance, most of whom booed Busch earlier in the evening and cheered at the end, probably spent the drive home recounting what they saw and debating who was at fault.

But when the winning driver is bothered by the way the race ended, you have to wonder if there's a way to fix the inherent flaws of restrictor-plate racing. Unfortunately, if anyone has come up with a better idea, they haven't stepped up and shared it with the powers that be.

"It's just a bad situation," Stewart said. "It's not bad because we're put in a bad position. It just is what it is. I don't feel as much gratification from winning this race as I probably should, I guess, because I don't like the way the outcome happened."

Jimmie Johnson, who finished third, agreed.

"There is nothing to do to stop it," Johnson said. "It's plate racing. We're damned if we do, we're damned if we don't.

"They're just racing. Tony didn't mean to dump him. Same thing with Talladega. It's just the product of restrictor-plate racing and every time we leave these restrictor-plate tracks, there's questions about how we can keep from having the big wreck and things like that, and you just can't. When you run plates and run wide-open all the way around the track, situations like this come around."

If anyone knows what Busch was experiencing in that blink of an eye, it would be Edwards. (Continued)