Matt Kenseth wins the 37 Hours of Daytona

Matt Kenseth won The Race that Wouldn't End®, otherwise known as the Daytona 500 sometime around 1:00am Tuesday morning.

Congrats to Matt for winning NASCAR's season opener -- this year a wild and wooly thing that included a lap two wreck that took out Jimmie Johnson and media sensation Danica Patrick, among others. Also, late in the race, Juan Pablo Montoya's car broke while trying to catch up to the field, and sent him spinning into one of the track dryers, causing a horrific crash that ignited the jet fuel in the truck that burned for what seemed like forever.

Both Montoya and the truck's driver came out of the crash okay, and track and NASCAR officials did an incredible job putting out the wild fire and repaired the track to get the race back under way.

My boy Tony Stewart came in 16th, and Danica managed to get her car fairly well back together to finish the race running, but tons of laps down.

But here's my thing -- and if you've read my stuff before you know what's coming: NASCAR effed with these cars in the off-season, claiming they were responding to "the fans" whom they claimed wanted a return to the old pack style of restrictor plate racing.

The changed the aero package and the cooling systems to prevent the so-called "2 car tango" that allowed multiple lead changes during a race. Mission accomplished guys. What we had this race was that once someone got in the lead, you couldn't get around them. There was only one workable lane in the race -- at the bottom. Even prior to the 2-car phenomenon, they could get 2 and 3 lanes of cars freight-training on the track. Not now.

If this is what NASCAR officials and those fans they claim entreated them consider exciting, I'd like them to explain it to me. It was dreadfully boring!

Every restart, once Kenseth got in the lead, all he did was swing up a lane to collect his teammate, they dropped down blocking the lower lane and Kenseth could have tooled around the track with his arm out the window. No one was going to get around him. The announcers even made note of the fact that no one could get the high lane to work. Where's the excitement in that?

The announcers spent all race toeing the company line about how this style of racing is preferable, but I'd love to get those guys off the record to hear what they really think.

Oh well, like I said, congrats to Matt for the win. Nice they finally got the race done. And it's on to Phoenix.