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I enjoyed the Daytona 500 so much that some folks criticized me for it. I'm a big boy. I've got thick skin. If I don't, this is the wrong business, particularly in this age of outspoken blabbermouths.

Blabbermouths. How did that go out of style? It's perfect.

Each week I watch the race and write what I see. What could be simpler?

My view is colored by experience. It isn't the same as everyone else's. This is a good thing. Let freedom ring.

If every lap had been like the last one, it would have been a really exciting race, or, maybe not, because if there had been 200 laps like the last one, the winner would have been the last one rolling. Somehow, at Daytona International Speedway, in NASCAR's most prestigious race, everyone managed to complete that last lap, including Denny Hamlin, who drove it like a lunatic, and I loved it because it was foolhardy and crazy, and that was fine because it worked.

Fans -- many of whom, by the way, either don't like Hamlin, or Toyota, or Joe Gibbs, who is so nice and wholesome that people dislike him for being nice and wholesome (see Johnson, Jimmie) -- wrote, to attempt to summarize in one thought, Oh, yeah, well, the jam-up finish was after two hours of boredom!!!!

How can people who use exclamation points with such frequency be bored? They get excited about boredom.

Watching what some might seem as boredom fascinates me. I watch how the cars act around each other. It's never exactly the same. This Daytona 500 was a sterner test than most. Cars kept spinning out, usually off the fourth turn, for no apparent reason. Dale Earnhardt Jr. drove one of them. That was one of the reasons for fan grumpiness. They were all fired up to see Junior win, and when he didn't, no victory by Hamlin – Denny, Harry, Hannibal, any Hamlin -- was going to please them.

One writer said nine cars spun from Thursday through Sunday with no one around them. In passenger cars, this is called "black ice." It's uncommon in Florida.

I was fascinated all afternoon.

No one "stepped out" before the final lap for the same reason that soldiers don't step out of a foxhole with enemy guns trained on them. Until the end, it just wasn't worth the risk. No telling how much money was involved. (Seriously, in NASCAR, as of this year, there really is no telling how much money is involved. The monolithic, divinely inspired ruling dynasty already decreed, in all its wisdom, a while back, that no one gets to know how many people are there.) In a sport where first and second places were separated by .01 of a second, the difference in the rewards of winner Hamlin and runner-up Martin Truex Jr. was somewhere among terms like "heap," "bushel," "whit," "mite," and, of course, "king's ransom."

Hamlin won a king's ransom. Truex won a mite less. Chase Elliott won a heap less. What do you want? Numbers?