Junior's electrifying charge salvages a Daytona fiasco (cont'd)

While it lasted, though, it was spectacular. And in a very small way, it allowed NASCAR and the speedway to salvage something out of a very long and difficult day.

"I have no clue how he did it," crew chief Lance McGrew said. "Still don't know. Somehow he managed to find a hole where there wasn't a hole, and we wound up passing nine cars in two laps to finish second. Pretty impressive."

The view from the driver's seat? "It was all a blur," said Earnhardt, who admitted he didn't remember much about it. " 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."

Foe the speedway it was a godsend, particularly considering the events that had preceded it. The first sign of a problem with the race track came just past the halfway mark, when Johnson shredded a tire for what appeared to be mysterious reasons. "We may have a red flag here," he told his crew over the radio, as he came to pit road for repairs. "Looks like a big piece of the track came up." Indeed it had, a chunk that speedway president Robin Braig said was 9 inches wide by 15 inches long by 2 inches deep, and had evidently been carved out of the 31-year-old surface by colder-than-normal temperatures. Many immediately recalled the 2004 incident at Martinsville Speedway, when a chunk of the track that punched a hole in Jeff Gordon's radiator required an hour and 15 minutes to repair.

This one, though, would prove considerably more difficult to fix. Daytona's engineers tried three different compounds until they found one they thought would work, toiling in a shaded, colder portion of the race track as cars sat idle under a red flag. After an hour and 40 minutes, the vehicles began rolling again. The remedy worked -- for about 40 laps. "It's wide open again," Kevin Harvick screamed over the radio. "Everything they put in it is out." The hole hadn't only hollowed out again, but had increased in size.

Officials went through the garage area rummaging for Bondo, a putty that hardens when it comes in contact with the air, and is typically used by fabricators to repair body damage on race cars. They used jet dryers and acetylene torches to try and warm the area so the filler would take. After 45 minutes, Daytona's asphalt specialists finally had a remedy that would last until the end of race. But many in the estimated crowd of 175,000 didn't stick around to see it.

"We take full responsibility," said Braig, who added that his staff walked the track prior to the event, and discovered no problems with the surface. "We've got to get better at doing our patchwork. If we have to do it again, we have to figure out the compounds. We've really got to understand the temperature and the heat of the pavement. We just couldn't get it to bond."

What they did get was a finish that rekindled moments of Junior past, that rendered the pothole forgettable for a little while, that almost made sitting through this day-to-night Daytona 500 feel worth it. "He's still got it," Earnhardt's public relations man, Mike Davis, exhorted on Twitter. Everyone finally got that one little glimpse they've been waiting for, even if Earnhardt didn't win, even if it took six hours and two red flags and umpteen pounds of crushed sheet metal to see it.

"Normally, you just can't make moves like that and make it work," McGrew said. "Somehow, someway, Dale made it work."

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.