Daytona's track woes wholly unacceptable

I bet NASCAR wants to crawl in a hole this morning.

We've got just the hole for it.

It's between Turns 1 and 2 at the Daytona International Speedway, and it turned racing's Super Bowl into a joke.

I don't know what it says when the star of your season opener is: a pothole.

Someone at Daytona should have their asphalt handed to him for this one.

There were a record number of leaders in this Daytona 500 and eventual (and we mean eventual) winner Jamie McMurray, God love him, cried like a baby. He was still no match for a hole in the track that turned a 1 o'clock or so start into a 7:30 of so finish - thanks to 2 hours, 25 minutes of red-flag delays, all that potty time, a patch job of a day.

I guess it could have been worse.

It could have been a sinkhole.

Might as well be.

This is the kind of embarrassment this sport doesn't need right now. This is NASCAR's idea of reconnecting with fans - thousands leaving before the finish?

If I'm a NASCAR fan, I'm livid. Imagine paying hundreds, thousands of dollars to come to Daytona - and you end up staring at a road crew. You could go down the street and watch the local pothole gang for free.

The Great American Race bottomed out.

"Sure," Daytona International Speedway president Robin Bragg said. "We're the 'World Center of Racing.' This is the Daytona 500. This is not supposed to happen. ... It's hallowed ground, and we accept responsibility."

As much as I love the vroom-vroom boys having to deal with the same thing we deal with - how do you like them potholes, fly guys? - I understand Safety First. And I didn't mind the education I got on asphalt, which covers the Daytona track.

I found out Our Friend Asphalt is actually a liquid, a binding agent, a glue that has been used for thousands of years, going way back to ancient Egypt, when Cleopatra ran the Nationwide Series.

And I was perfectly willing to listen to NASCAR and Daytona excuses, like recent rain and, as Bragg noted, "unusually cold ambient temperatures."

Then I found out the last time Daytona was repaved was: 32 years ago.

Thirty-two years ago?

You've repaved your driveway more.

"It's due, I'd say," second-place finisher Dale Earnhardt Jr. said.

I mean, you would think, in one of the million meetings they've had at Daytona the past 32 years, with all the millions, billions this sport makes, somebody, like Corky in maintenance, might have said, "Hey, why don't we repave the road?"

True, the drivers mostly like Daytona bumpy, like the grip. Truer still, there are actual plans to repave Daytona by 2012. They might want to move that timeline up.

Daytona crews tried all sorts of stuff to fix The Great American Pothole after the race was stopped with 78 laps to go. The track was crawling with engineers, but they couldn't hit on the right sealing mixture. The cars went out and tore them a new one in no time at all, another red flag, another delay. Why didn't they just put an orange cone in front of it?

There were guys using blowtorches to "heat cure" the patch. I heard someone made a trip to a local dentist's office for some really, really strong epoxy. Hey, anybody got any bubble gum? A special team of state and county pothole workers reportedly was called in. They inspected the damage, then immediately broke for lunch.

Finally, what turned the trick was a batch of Bondo, a two-part putty.

Bondo, the official two-part putty of NASCAR.

Not that it affected the race, unless you count people losing interest, which I do. A stream of cars pulled away from Daytona, World Center of Ridiculous, before the 500 was done. Talk about unusually cold ambient temperatures.

The shame that there was good racing, including a new-fangled green-white-checkered finish - Earnhardt charging at the end, but unable to overcome McMurray, who was overcome after he won.

A mere sideshow.

With attendance and TV ratings declining, NASCAR is trying to spice things up, encourage more bump drafting, more action. The rallying cry for this season is "Have at it, boys."

We just didn't know it was the boys with shovels in their hands.