SONOMA, Calif. -- There are no guarantees in racing until the checkered flag falls, but everyone who was in the middle of Marcos Ambrose's flipped-switch gaffe under caution Sunday in the closing laps of the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Infineon Raceway was sure he was going to win.

Everyone, that is, except actual race winner Jimmie Johnson. Johnson took advantage of Ambrose mis-timing an attempt to save fuel by switching his No. 47 Toyota's engine off and on while the field circled the 1.99-mile road course under the seventh and final caution with fewer than seven laps remaining.

“

It's NASCAR's house and I'll always play by the rules. I don't agree with it, I don't like it and that's only because I lost the race.

”

-- MARCOS AMBROSE

Heading up the hill to Turn 2 on lap 104 Ambrose suddenly slowed -- to the shock of Johnson, who was behind Ambrose in second, and his spotter; Earl Barban, who was above Turn 2 on the hillside spotters' stand.

"He started to slow down and Jimmie squirted around him about the same time I started to say 'go around him,'" Barban said outside the No. 48 hauler after he emerged carrying a wine-stained crystal goblet-topped trophy. "He was shutting his stuff off to save gas and it just didn't re-fire. Putting him back in seventh was fair."

"Normally guys shut the car off downhill, coasting to save fuel," Johnson said later, after leaving Victory Lane. "I didn't think at first that he had shut the car off going up the hill [because] that's just the last place you would probably do it. So I thought maybe he ran out of fuel or had an electrical problem, you know -- something major -- because the car just came to a stop.

"So at that point I'm thinking, 'How does the procedure work? I know if you come to a stop, you're clearly not maintaining a reasonable speed. It will be interesting to see where they put him.'

"It's not like the car broke. He had it shut off. The way the rule reads, you have to maintain a reasonable speed. Coming to a stop on the race track is no speed, so NASCAR followed their rule they have set in place. With all that being said, I feel bad for him and his team owners.

In NASCAR's eyes the event had no relevance to the finish of the fall 2007 race at Kansas Speedway in which Greg Biffle fell behind the pace car and was passed by several cars that did not feel he was maintaining pace car speed. Biffle's victory was upheld because; in NASCAR's determination he "maintained a reasonable speed."

Ambrose, obviously, did not as he tried to negotiate the steep slope between Turns 1 and 2.

"In this case [Ambrose] did not, in our opinion maintain a reasonable speed, and six or seven cars passed him," NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said. "We looked at the video available to us and we didn't penalize him [for returning to the head of the field after re-firing his car], we made him go back to where he'd blended in and was scored, which was seventh."

Ambrose lined up seventh for the restart, fell back to eighth and was only able to advance two more spots, to sixth, in the final five laps.

Ambrose was devastated by the miscue in his 63rd career start because he appeared on his way to his first career Cup Series victory. He parked his car in a garage near his hauler and tried to make his way to his truck on foot, before he was intercepted by a throng of media. (Continued)