DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Sunday's 52nd Daytona 500 was a bizarre race with a weird conclusion but for the most part, multiple attempts at a green-white-checkered finish met with competitors' approval -- regardless of the way their races ended.

Since the finish was a thriller -- and a popular one at that with second-time Daytona winner Jamie McMurray adding the Great American Race to his 2007 July victory -- you can't imagine the fans would complain.

“

The green-white-checkered was put into play to give us an opportunity to finish the race under green. Finishing under yellow is quite a melodramatic moment.

”

-- DALE EARNHARDT JR.

Former Daytona 500 winner Dale Earnhardt Jr., who hasn't won a Cup race since the summer of 2008, used the late multiple restarts to jump from 22nd to second. The typically unsatisfied racer, Earnhardt expressed some frustration on not winning, but he was mostly upbeat.

"The rules are the rules [and] we all sort of have to race by 'em, whatever they are," Earnhardt said. "At the end, you got to go. People are doing some things they typically won't do [but] I never once felt like I had NASCAR looking over my shoulder while I was doing it. That made it a lot easier for me to just form my game plan and hope it worked."

Earnhardt described the final laps of the race as a blur.

"I was just going wherever they weren't. I really don't enjoy being that aggressive, but if there was enough room for the radiator to fit, you just kind of held the gas down and prayed for the best. It was a lot of fun -- it was frustrating to come that close [to winning] but hell -- we were running 22nd at the first green-white-checkered."

As it is with any other situation in racing, how it affected you had some effect on how you reacted to it. But most competitors -- who at their core are fans themselves -- sided with the paying customers.

Greg Biffle, who finished third, obviously lost the most because he was leading, literally in sight of the white flag that would have ended the race when Bill Elliott and Joey Logano crashed between Turns 3 and 4 behind him.

"I was thinking, 'Why do I have to be the first casualty of the rule change -- to be the guy that didn't get the win?'" Biffle said. " It's just the way it is. Like Junior said, we got to race by the rules. That's what they've determined that we're going to do. I wish I was out there spraying some champagne right now.

"I think maybe two attempts at the green-white-checkered -- three might be a little excessive. We kind of got caught because the one attempt wasn't considered a green-white-checkered because it was under the normal amount of laps and the restart was under the normal. That kind of made it extraordinary." (Continued)