But under a revamped Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup format in which Earnhardt’s Daytona victory likely guarantees him a berth, the disappointment over the finish was hardly what it might have been.

"As long as they’re telling the truth about if you win, you’re in, you ain’t worried about it," he said in the garage area as rain began to fall once again. "You ain’t worried about it — you either win, or you don’t win. Second (through) last doesn’t really matter. If you don’t win, you just go home and try again."

Earnhardt’s team will certainly go home and investigate what caused two tires to get chewed up. His Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson had the tread come off a tire before the race was interrupted by a three-hour rain delay, leaving the six-time champion two laps down at the red flag and contributing to a 19th-place result. But Johnson lost a right-front, and according to Goodyear, crew chief Chad Knaus’ decision to take only lefts under a Lap 50 competition caution created a high-wear situation on a green track washed free of rubber by rain.

Complicating the situation was the fact that the No. 88 car seemed to return to its original form late in the race.

"It’s frustrating," said Steve Letarte, Earnhardt’s crew chief. "I’ve had cars that eat tires before in my career, but they normally eat them all day. So I don’t know how this one miraculously got better. Everybody has the same opportunity when they come to the race track. We’ve run well for three weeks, and we just couldn’t put together a good finish tonight."

Earnhardt said he couldn’t detect the root issue from the driver’s seat — all he knew was, the car was shaking up a storm. "Tires were just falling apart on the damn thing for a while. So I don’t know what else we could have done," he said.

"It ran fine the first part of the race, so it ain’t the green track, and all that (stuff). So we’ll just take it home, make sure nothing’s changed in the car. Otherwise, I don’t know what happed there. Just tore two left-front tires up, and it won’t run at all when that left-front tire came down to the cords."

With the finish, Earnhardt fell to second in the Sprint Cup standings, 10 points behind new leader Brad Keselowski. But he remains off to one of the best starts of his career, and having a race victory already in his pocket certainly mitigated the sting felt Sunday night.

"It definitely helps. We’re just shooting for wins," Letarte said. "I don’t think we had a winning car before that, but you never know. Nobody thought the 99 (team of Edwards) had a winning car, and they ended up winning. We just want to be in it and have an opportunity, and we just didn’t get to stay in it all day."

MORE:

"It appears that in the flagstand, one of the flag people had leaned on the switch that is the manual override for the caution lights, and so that happened," Pemberton said. "… That happened, and at that time when the flagstand realized that the caution lights were illuminated, the flag man threw the flag, and then after that happened we froze the field from the tower. "

Pemberton said most flagstands have a manual override switch controlling the caution lights, which are normally illuminated by race control before the caution flag is displayed. The switch in Bristol, he added, wasn’t secured properly. Once they realized the caution lights were on, NASCAR officials threw a full caution because operation of the lights had become compromised.

"We tried to turn them off, and we realized that the override switch was on and they were hung on caution," Pemberton said. "It was a stupid error."

NASCAR used video to review the situation, and made one change in the final running order, flipping Kasey Kahne and Jeff Gordon to seventh and eighth place, respectively. Pemberton said the caution was thrown six seconds after the lights were inadvertently turned on, and the field was frozen 20 seconds after the full caution was issued.

Not even the flagman, Pemberton said, was initially aware of why the caution was out. Winning crew chief Jimmy Fennig speculated at first that part of the electrical system had shorted due to all the rain Sunday, but that proved to not be the case. Rain came down hard almost immediately afterward, heading off a green-white-checkered finish Edwards did not want to see.

"I can tell you, for Robin and NASCAR to come up here and explain exactly what happened immediately after the race and just put it out there that, ‘Hey, it was a mistake and it was inadvertent,’ I think that says a lot about the state of the leadership of our sport," said Edwards, who lost a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race to Dennis Setzer at Charlotte in 2004 when he slowed because a caution light was unintentionally illuminated.

"I was leading the last time that happened at Charlotte in a Truck race, and we got passed, and … (NASCAR) put out a press release saying, ‘We messed up, we apologize to Carl and his crew.’ And I think NASCAR, that was (10) years ago, and they still stand by their mistakes. And for them to come up here and say, ‘Hey, we messed up,’ that means a lot. As a sport, they make a lot of tough calls. We all do a lot of things where there’s a lot of room for mistakes, and so the outcome worked out for me, but even if it hadn’t, I’m glad to be part of something where they just say, ‘Hey, we screwed up.’ "

Pemberton said NASCAR would review the situation with the goal of preventing a similar episode in the future.

"We learn a lot of lessons, and when we learn a lesson like this, we’ll go in and further investigate some things," he said. "As you know, all the electronics that we’ve had and have installed in the trailers for freeze the field and all these other things … you still have to integrate (them) into the track facilities, so there’s probably some things that we needed to do to better secure that area where the manual override is on the lights."

MORE:

Over the radio after the incident, crew chief Chad Knaus told Johnson that the tire "just came apart. It’s not even flat. The tread came off of it. There’s nothing wrong with it. The rest of the tire’s great. But I’m sure that’s something we did. I’m sure that’s our fault."

The No. 48 team is no stranger to tire issues, most famously at Phoenix late in 2012 when a tire problem led to a crash which effectively ended Johnson’s championship hopes. Johnson showed off the remains of the tread, which had been pulled into long strands, on Fox television during the rain delay.

"Something made it come apart in this really long 50-foot section," Johnson said. "I don’t know if we clipped something on the track that wore the tread and it unwound, or if something else happened. … Either way, we’re down multiple laps."

A representative of Goodyear, which provides race tires for NASCAR’s national circuits, pointed out that Knaus chose to take only left-side tires during the competition caution at lap 50, which was issued because rain earlier in the day had washed rubber off the track surface.

Goodyear termed it "literally a high-wear situation," which can cause the spiral-wound tread on the tire to become completely unwound like pulling a thread on a sweater.

READ MORE: