'Scandal' puts NASCAR exactly where it wants (cont'd)

Besides, there's an unintended benefit to all this hubbub during the biggest race weekend of the year. Tuesday during his state of the sport address, NASCAR chairman Brian France said the sport remains "under-covered" in some areas. For some reason, NASCAR has a tough time getting through to casual sports fans and getting on sports-talk radio.

Gordon's car fails
post-race inspection

Jeff Gordon won the second Gatorade Duel but will not start the Daytona 500 from the fourth position after a height violation was found on his No. 24 Chevrolet.

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Well, this week, he got both. NASCAR was all over the place -- on CNN, ABC News, National Public Radio and other entities that normally wouldn't be able to locate Martinsville on a map. Waltrip's plight was a major topic of conversation earlier this week on ESPN Radio, whose television arm is dumping all kinds of resources into a series it virtually ignored the last six years.

Even the accused can see the upside.

"I hate it for the sport to see the focus get turned to that, but I will say drama always outweighs pure excitement. It just seems to get more attention," said Jeff Gordon, who lost his fourth-place starting spot after his car was found to be an inch too low following Thursday's 150-mile qualifying races.

"So for that part, I mean, it's drawing attention to the sport. Now, I hope that we can get this attention and get people watching it and go out Sunday and put on an awesome, exciting, three-wide battle to the finish. It's going to balance itself out."

Not everyone agrees.

"We've given the perception that we're just a bunch of malicious guys out there trying to screw everybody out of a win," Jeff Burton said. "That's not good for our sport."

But the attention is. NASCAR, even today, still needs help getting into living rooms in certain segments of American society. Yes, six teams got busted for some sort of technical violation. But of the 61 cars that came to Daytona, 55 played within the rules. Now, ignoring that would be scandalous.

The opinions are solely those of the writer.