NASCAR's final race

At least for this year. And it's not really a wide-open chase anymore. Everybody else has been eliminated and it all boils down to 2 drivers, their cars, and teams, to determine who displaces 5-time champ Jimmy Johnson, and assumes the throne.

It's either going to be Carl Edwards or Tony Stewart. Who to root for? Beats me. One guy's called "Smoke", and the other does backflips. That's probably a push.  Edwards drives a Ford and Stewart drives a Chevy. The official name of the event is "The Ford 400", so it doesn't take a mental heavyweight to figure out who the sponsors will be pulling for.

This is where it gets confusing. The race will be held at Homestead -- but nobody seems to actually live there. If Edwards is trying to close ground on Stewart during the course of the race -- would it be fair to call it the "Chevy Chase"? But wait. Didn't a guy by that same name used to imitate a Ford? See what I mean?

Yours truly takes solace in the fact the invasive Japanese species has been eliminated for now. Joe Gibbs should be ashamed of himself. A deeply religious man, who prides himself on patriotism, Joe stands behind mom, apple pie, the red, white, and blue, and --- Toyota? Somewhere along the way, Mr. Gibbs seems to have hung a hard right on a NASCAR oval.

And what's up with all that anyway? Isn't NASCAR supposed to be all all about American racing? That "N" in NASCAR stands for national. Give it a few years, and if things proceed like others have, it might be renamed JASCAR.

Consider what's left of the Indy car series. After the big feud that pretty much destroyed an American icon, most every driver on that circuit runs a Honda engine these days.

Why is that? A couple reasons. The Japanese are notorious for taking an original American idea in technology, analyzing it, making it smaller and cheaper, adding a few whistles and bells, then selling it back to the American public -- in the meantime running many American businesses out of dodge. Cameras and TVs are gone -- now they're working on cars.

Secondly, when it comes to auto racing, the American companies dropped the ball.to allow this to happen in the first place. Don't tell me the American auto manufacturers can spend billions to open plants in Mexico, Brazil, China, and who knows where -- but can't afford a few measly million to develop superior racing engines. If you do -- I won't believe you.

For that matter, look at history. A great deal of the technology that finally finds it way into passenger cars has it's roots not with some MIT engineering grad poring over a draft board, but rather with racing teams that are always looking for something new that will give them an edge over the competition. With apologies to Walt Disney, these are the true "imagineers" when it comes to innovation in automobiles.

So who's going to win this Sunday? Your guess is as good as mine. I just hope the other guys stay out of the way and let the Top 2 have a clean race. It would be a shame if some hot-headed, nitwit Toyota driver, and you know who I mean, did something stupid to screw that up.

But that's just sort of what the whole bunch of them do -- isn't it?