A lot to digest from the all-star weekend

Well, it's midnight and all-star day is over.

Kasey Kahne, Ray Evernham and Kenny Francis have just left the media center and are down on the start-finish line doing more of the silly "hat dance" photos that are part of the postrace victory duties.

Kahne did a tremendous job in winning the race. Francis, the team director, made the right call in taking no tires on the final pit stop. I never thought for a minute that any of the three cars that didn't get tires before the final segment would win the race, but I guess that shows track position is king.

I am squarely on the record as being opposed to the idea of the fan vote, which I call the "pity pass." Fans have squandered it, horribly, in past years by putting guys in the main event that had no shot at winning. In selecting Kahne this time the fans did well, and I would have said that if he hadn't won.

Still, Kahne shouldn't have been in the race. He finished fifth in the Sprint Showdown. Two cars advanced out of that race and only one of them should have - the winner. You should have to win something to make the all-star race. I would cut the exemption for past winners of this event and past Cup champions from 10 to five years, too.

But that's all water under the bridge for this year.

It will be interesting to see if Kahne's win provides any momentum for his team going forward. It's interesting that his teammate, Elliott Sadler, was really down after getting wrecked out of the Showdown. Sadler made a mistake on Lap 2 and crashed at Darlington last week, too.

Kahne's win came at a good time for Gillett-Evernham Motorsports, that's for sure.

The 25-25-25-25 format for this year's all-star race wasn't an improvement in any way that I saw. The race wasn't thrilling because there were no cautions other than the ones for the breaks between segments. The lack of any kind of field inversion didn't help, either.

In a larger sense, though, I think that if next Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 is the same kind of event -- where the leader can't be touched and track position is the be-all and end-all - I am going to have to say that NASCAR has to do something about the rules on this car.

I know fans will howl because they didn't change things last year when Hendrick Motorsports was dominating. But NASCAR can't spend this summer, with the economy like it's going to be, having races where the only place the leader gets passed is on pit road.

There are people who say the COT needs to be abandoned, but that's not going to happen. It does look like something is going to have to be done to change what's happening on the track, though.

It'll be an hour or more before I get to leave here because of the traffic. That'll put me home about 3, I would guess. I wish I could go to the drag race at Bristol tomorrow, but I have to write a second-day story and some other stuff for next week after I finally get up in the morning.

Fortunately for me I didn't use any of the good postrace stuff tonight. That's because NASCAR and Lowe's Motor Speedway again treated the print media like crap in the postrace.

I mean that literally. Think of Kahne's time after winning as food. Network television is the mouth. Network radio is the esophagus. NASCAR "partners" like Speed and ESPN are the stomach. Photographers taking staged photos that could be shot two hours after the race - as is still being done, are the pancreas. Local television is the intestines.

And, down at the end, you know what that makes people like me, right?