CONCORD, N.C. _ Say what you will about the inaugural Roval race at Charlotte Motor Speedway _ that half the field ended up mangled or shredded, that there were overwhelming crests of relief and disappointment, that _ but there's only one thing overly apparent, a lone point of consensus, after Sunday's race:
It was a complete and total success.
Now, critics won't be so easy on the Roval. They'll complain that it's not conventional driving, that the irregular oval-road course hybrid isn't "how NASCAR should be."
They'll lament the wreckage in the final seven laps that drastically altered not only the course of the race but of the playoffs for a handful of drivers.
At the same time, they'll also whine about how boring it was, how those two wrecks at the end salvaged an otherwise ordinary, boring race.
And you know what?
They're wrong. Completely, totally wrong.
Know how you can tell? The post-race scene. Walking up and down pit road after Ryan Blaney's victory, his first this season, you could glean everything you needed to know about whether the Roval was a success.
First, the cars, and what a mess they were.
Whether by virtue of "The Big One" on Lap 103 _ when Brad Keselowski careened straight into the wall in Turn 1, bounced out into the open road, and took seemingly half the field with him in a series of follow-up crashes _ or the last-lap debacle where Jimmie Johnson and Martin Truex Jr., both vying for the win, spun out and into one another, not a car finished the race damage-less.
Some, such as Blaney's, had just a few scrapes or nicks around the edges. Others, such as Kyle Larson's, had huge sheets of metal peeled back and jagged like torn paper, practically skeletons of how they began.
That's how you know some stuff just went down.
Then there were the drivers themselves, all still trying to answer the same question: "What just happened?"
Ultimately, with this experimental track as a playoff cutdown race, four guys had to be eliminated. The first three _ Austin Dillon, Erik Jones, and Denny Hamlin _ were decided early on, either by nature of crashing out or needing a win to advance. But then the final elimination came down to a 12th-place tie in points between Johnson, Aric Almirola, and Kyle Larson ... and not even those three knew what happened.
Johnson ended up as the odd man out because of his finishes the past three races, and once that became known, you could see the hope fade from his face. His eyes wandered, his expression tightened.
The reality of his unlikely elimination set in.
And Almirola, well he hardly understood what happened. Literally seconds before he entered a post-race press conference _ and even during at times _ Almirola was asking how he had made the cut.
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