Once smoke clears, Smoke finishes first

If you happen to drive by Talladega Superspeedway on Monday, don't be surprised to see a hazy sky hovering over the massive track.

Jimmie Johnson increases his Chase lead to 72 points. (US Presswire)

After the wild Talladega 500 there's bound to be some leftover smoke in the air.

The official box score says that somehow 27 cars were running at the finish of Sunday's race, although a good portion of those looked like they were survivors of a county fair demolition derby.

Not one but two of the dreaded "Big Ones" punctuated the race with a couple of other "smaller" incidents that sent the likes of Jeff Gordon and Denny Hamlin into the wall.

It was just another example of a typical afternoon of restrictor-plate racing at the longest oval track on the schedule.

"Same old Talladega," said Biffle, caught up in the second major melee when teammate Carl Edwards tried to bump draft through Turns 3 and 4 at 190 mph. "This will hurt us in the points, but we've got six more (races). We knew this one was the wild card ... you just can't expect anything out of Talladega."

What you can expect out of Talladega is the controversial bump drafting method with drivers literally ramming the car ahead at nearly 200 mph. It's a necessary evil in restrictor-plate racing but one that can lead to a multitude of trouble like what was on display Sunday.

"Guys were idiots driving into one another," said Gordon, who was trying for back-to-back October Talladega wins but ended his day in the garage with a battered race car. "That's not the way you have to race any more. I include myself in that statement when I say it because that's the kind of racing we have out there.

"You've got to beat the rear bumper off the guy in front of you in order to get ahead; to make a move. And you're stacked up there three-wide, several rows deep, and it's like bumper cars at 190 mph. It's crazy. It's great when you come to the checkered flag and you see it and you're in one piece."

Edwards' and Biffle's cars were hardly in one piece after their tangle which swept up 10 others and was triggered by a bad decision from the driver who came into the weekend only 10 points out of the Chase lead.

"I was just pushing Greg as hard as I could," Edwards said. "It's my fault and I apologize to everybody caught up in that wreck. I don't know that there's a right time to make that move, but it was going well. We went down the back straightaway and I thought I could get Greg out there clear of Tony (Stewart) and we'd be in pretty good position with 13 or 14 to go or however many laps were left, so you just do the best you can.

"Sometimes things like this happen." As eight of the 12 Chase participants were involved in one of the day's accidents, somehow Jimmie Johnson missed all the trouble.

After falling into a hole early when an engine misfire dropped him a lap back, Johnson got back on the lead lap and miraculously avoided the string of accidents to finish ninth and extend his series point lead.