Fantastic show aside, plate racing still has its critics

There's nothing in NASCAR that creates a polarizing effect quite like restrictor plate racing, the latest dose of which hit last weekend at Talladega Superspeedway.

You love it or you hate it -- kinda like the same estimation that Talladega winner Kyle Busch seems to be held in.

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Like everything else that seems to be black-and-white -- or at least seems like it should be simple to put down in black-and-white; restrictor plate racing just doesn't work that way.

It's inevitably here and it ain't going anywhere. The NASCAR garage's inestimable mechanical geniuses have seen to that, with the way they can milk horsepower and speed out of everything from a milk crate to a tricked-out Sprint Cup machine; which these days some haters of the new car would liken more to the milk crate than a streamlined race vehicle.

If you watched the sport through the era of consistently flying cars, you wouldn't question the use of plates now -- though that's the single, most polarizing issue of all.

A couple years ago, Rusty Wallace did a high-speed technology test at Talladega for some of NASCAR's technical partners, and took the plate off a "standard car." As much as he enjoyed the result; which was laps somewhere between 220 and 230 mph, he understood that from a sheer standpoint of being able to race at that speed, never mind being safe for competitors and fans; it just would never be feasible.

Tweaking the current set-up to produce the best racing possible is an obviously more reachable goal.

Sunday's results seemed to be a positive. While you'll never take the unpredictable aspect of having 43 in-the-end-me-first guys striving to win; teammate-, buddy- or brother-be-damned -- the action was unpredictable enough to be pretty entertaining.

Small numbers of cars, like two or three, were able to hook up and make moves that were pretty impressive and not recently seen at this venue.

I'm sure the polarizing effect of the new car is still in play; but I saw a number of beating and banging and hold-on-Nelly sideways moments that probably would have resulted in a "big one" a lot sooner than they occurred, if the old standard car had been in use.

And that was refreshing.

But if you want to talk about polarized, take the aforementioned (lil') brother Busch. Some people went wild because they thought the Shrub should have been penalized for passing Jimmie Johnson below the yellow "out-of-bounds" line on the bottom of the track coming off, I believe in Turn 4, late in the race (watch video).

I didn't think there were that many Jimmie Johnson supporters out there to raise such an outcry. But I guess that's a stupid estimation. (Continued)