BROOKLYN, Mich. -- It was such a bizarre sight that, at first, it didn't even register. Here was Jimmie Johnson's race car, the silver and blue vehicle that had dominated so much of Sunday's event at Michigan International Speedway, approaching the start-finish line for the next-to-last time and suddenly traveling -- backward?

Just enough fuel

Jimmie Johnson and Greg Biffle ran out of fuel. That left third-place Mark Martin in position to cruise on by and win the LifeLock 400 in a thriller at Michigan.

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At least that's the way it appeared, as Johnson's fuel cell ran dry and one competitor after another zoomed past the three-time series champion. He led 146 laps, but his final circuit was a painfully slow one as the No. 48 car rolled around the full circumference of the 2-mile race track at a crawl. Johnson coasted onto pit road, took a few gallons of gas, and crossed the finish line in 22nd place.

"That's my fault, man," crew chief Chad Knaus told his driver over the radio.

And yet, Johnson and his fans were among the very few who left Michigan disappointed after a wonderfully chaotic series of events that saw two passes for the lead on the final lap, the top two contenders for the win run out of fuel, and 50-year-old Mark Martin reach Victory Lane for the third time this season. Oh, how the traditionalists love to bash fuel mileage, believing it to be some cheap means of victory, clinging to this glorified and anachronistic notion that the only manly way to win is to barrel three-wide toward the checkered flag. And yet, fuel mileage on Sunday delivered what was easily the most entertaining event of this Cup season.

It's time to recognize the fact that fuel mileage races can be terribly dramatic, and that their winners are legitimate for different but wholly justifiable reasons. The endgame of crew chiefs trying to outthink one another, the surprise of cars suddenly slowing, the unknown of who will make it and who won't -- it's terribly more interesting than a mere green-flag pass. Oh yes, it's supposed to be all about speed and power and going fast. But it's also about being smart and patient and trying to mitigate the prospect of failure before 90,000 people. Martin succeeded in all those areas Sunday, and won the race because of them. Every weekend gives you checkers. Fuel-mileage races give you chess.

"I think typically, when you think fuel-mileage races, you think boring. This was not a boring fuel-mileage race," said Jeff Gordon, who may be a little biased because the failures in front of him allowed him to finish second. "There was hard racing all the way down to the finish, and the two guys leading didn't make it. I thought that was great."

Johnson and Biffle may argue otherwise, but the consensus after the event was that they had no one to blame but themselves. As the final laps wound down, both crew chiefs told their drivers that the time was coming for them to back down. Greg Erwin, Biffle's crew chief, estimated that the No. 16 car was going to be about half a lap short -- a calculation that turned out to be entirely accurate. But with the lead with 10 to go, and without a victory this season, and knowing how much bonus points mean in the Chase, he turned his driver loose.

“

I think typically, when you think fuel-mileage races, you think boring. This was not a boring fuel-mileage race. There was hard racing all the way down to the finish, and the two guys leading didn't make it. I thought that was great.

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-- JEFF GORDON

"Run it like you need to, buddy," he told Biffle. "Let's go."

Later, he explained why. "I felt like we had to go for the win," Erwin said after Biffle had finished fifth. "... We'd just been so close so many times, between Texas and California and Las Vegas, our performance at Darlington. We've had a handful of these mile-and-a-half and two-mile race tracks that could have been W's for us, but we came up a little bit short. He didn't want to lay down and finish second or third. He wanted to make a charge at the win. We did it as a team."

Meanwhile, Knaus was having to make his own difficult decisions. With 15 remaining, he told Johnson that he had six more laps to run down Biffle, who had come out ahead of the No. 48 car in the afternoon's final round of pit stops. Erwin had to know what Knaus was thinking; soon afterward, he told Biffle it was only a matter of time before Johnson eased up. The final green-flag run was 45 laps, so everybody was going to be close on fuel. But nobody wanted to back down, either.

"I knew I wouldn't be able to make it with the pace the 48 was running," Biffle said. "I could run a lot faster than I was running. In fact, I picked it up a half a second to run his lap times. But I thought to myself, 'There's no way we're going to make it.'"

Johnson finally nosed into the lead with six laps remaining, just beyond Knaus' original window. "All right guys," Knaus told his team over the radio. "We only want to go fast enough to keep the 16 behind us, copy?"

Copy. And they did just that, until the fuel tank ran dry and the No. 48 car began its achingly slow backpedal. Johnson was understandably livid over the radio. Afterward, he was considerably more composed. Maybe, he surmised, they used up too much fuel overtaking Martin for second. Maybe they should have let Biffle go and taken their chances.

"I guess if we would have held back we would have finished second or third, and I guess maybe the 16 would have run out and I still would have won," Johnson said. "But I can't be disappointed with the fuel. The 48 car, myself, whatever it is, we don't get the best fuel mileage, and we're always fast. So I'll take being fast and losing every now and then on fuel mileage."

Seconds after Johnson ran dry, Biffle began slowing off Turn 2, the battle of wits between the two teams having claimed another casualty. Denny Hamlin, who wound up finishing third, saw it all unfold in front of him, and his synopsis was a concise one. "I think the 16 and the 48 kind of baited each other into running hard, and that's what happened," he said.

It certainly seemed that way. Then there was Martin, the cagey veteran, biding his time and feathering the accelerator, and capitalizing on gambles by others gone awry. He ran out of gas just before the finish line, but by then, it didn't matter. "Old man, you snookered us again," Gordon endearingly told his Hendrick Motorsports teammate in Victory Lane. And yet, Martin knew he may not have won had the drivers in front of him taken the same approach he did.

"Jimmie and Chad going hard is what allowed us to win the race," said Alan Gustafson, Martin's crew chief. Still, it's not an easy thing for a driver to balance going fast and going slow at the same time. And given that Biffle and Johnson both entered Sunday in strong position to qualify for the Chase -- a luxury Martin, 13th in points before his victory, did not enjoy -- it was much easier for them to roll the dice. Of course, it was hard to see that big picture through the immediate disappointment of Sunday afternoon, when two drivers who each thought they had the race won were left wondering what happened.

"If I'm Jimmie Johnson or Greg Biffle, I'm going to push a little harder," Gordon said. "It's going to be really hard to discipline yourself. That's where I give Mark Martin so much credit. He's such a great driver and a smart driver. I think he could have pushed harder to hold Jimmie off, and maybe even caught Biffle. But I think his crew chief and him were communicating, and Mark was disciplined enough to say, 'We're not going to make it, and I've got to back off.' He played it perfectly."

So go ahead, criticize fuel mileage. Say Martin didn't really deserve to win Sunday's race, just as some have said Casey Mears didn't deserve that Coca-Cola 600 two seasons ago or Dale Earnhardt Jr. didn't really deserve to win here in Michigan last year. And then look at the calculations and the gambles and the strategy and the disappointment that took place on the big Brooklyn oval. It all makes mashing the accelerator look quite simple, doesn't it?

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.