Five races doesn't make a season, but you learn a lot

Five races does not a season make.

But five races can provide a snapshot into at least some of the storylines that will dominate the 36-race Sprint Cup Series season. So with last Sunday's Food City 500 from Bristol Motor Speedway in the books, here are five things we've learned from the first five races of the 2008 Cup campaign:

This isn't last year

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Five races in, and still no race victories for Hendrick Motorsports. It was right about this time last year when Kyle Busch, who now drives for Joe Gibbs Racing, won at Bristol to give Hendrick its third win in a row as an organization. That spawned all the talk of Hendrick's domination in the sport, and the accompanying questions: Was it healthy for the series? How long would it go on? Could anyone possibly ramp up to compete with them?

Team owners such as Jack Roush and Richard Childress and even Rick Hendrick himself warned that the sport was cyclical, that other teams -- such as Roush and Childress and Gibbs -- had previously gone through stretches where they, too, seemed invincible. Hendrick insisted that his drivers couldn't stay on top forever; the other owners insisted that they would do whatever they could to catch up.

And now, five races into 2008, Carl Edwards and the No. 99 Ford he drives for Roush Fenway Racing has two victories; Ryan Newman and the No. 12 Dodge he drives for Penske Racing has one, the season-opening Daytona 500; Kyle Busch, now wheeling the No. 18 Toyota for JGR, has one; and Jeff Burton finally got Chevrolet on the board by leading a one-two-three charge for Richard Childress Racing at Bristol.

Does it mean Hendrick's reign is over? Hardly. Any organization that employs drivers such as Johnson, four-time points champion Jeff Gordon, the surging Dale Earnhardt Jr. and even the underrated, snakebitten Casey Mears can't be counted out. The fact of the matter is, however, that others have caught up and the "new car" appears to have leveled the playing field. Those aren't bad things for the sport overall.

Toyota is better, but ...

They've still got work to do, as Denny Hamlin's fuel-pump problems, which cost him the Bristol victory that fell to Burton instead, clearly indicate. And this came after Hamlin had other mechanical issues earlier in the season and after Busch's own power-steering failure also knocked him out of the lead in the Bristol race.

Rarely in the long and storied history of Cup racing has there been a more controversial entry into the ranks than that of the Toyota manufacturer. Defend their right to be here in the slightest and you run the risk of being buried under the avalanche of hundreds of e-mails that will question everything from your patriotism to your intelligence to the rights of any descendents of participants in World War II to put the hatred of the past behind us all and move on (I know all of this from first-hand experience, trust me). (Continued)