How long has it been since there was a Winston Cup race in which anybody really understood what happened?

Sunday’s Brickyard 400 was no more confusing than your average tax form.

Kevin Harvick won the race, and if you watched only the beginning and the end that would seem logical. He started from the pole in the No. 29 Chevrolet and led 17 laps.

He then led the final 16 laps. It was all of the stuff in between that was so baffling.

When Elliott Sadler’s blown engine brought out a yellow on Lap 105, the stage was set. As teams lined up to come in under that caution, you knew everybody would need one more stop and that some teams would try different strategies to gain track position.

In other words, the race was about to start.

Tony Stewart had led 60 laps in a Chevrolet that looked stronger than truck-stop coffee. But when an air gun misfired on his four-tire stop, Stewart came off pit road in seventh and never got back to the lead.

Ryan Newman had buried himself in the bottomless pit that traffic has become these days by running out of gas on the way to pit road for a green-flag stop on Lap 81. With Stewart falling into that chasm, too, control seemingly went to rookie Jamie McMurray.

McMurray had started 22nd but drove smartly through the pack in the early going. By Lap 114, he was leading and already thinking about how big it would be for him to win at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in his first try.

Matt Kenseth planned a late gas-and-go stop in an effort to win the race. When the yellow came, he was afraid it would to dump him back in the pack. But it didn’t.

McMurray and Harvick had pitted before the yellow, so they stayed out when those who hadn’t stopped came in. Stewart would have been up there with them, but he pitted.

Under different circumstances, McMurray would have been just about home free when the race restarted on Lap 145. If he’d had clean air, he most likely would have pulled away. But a bunch of cars that had gone a lap down while pitting before the yellow stayed out, too, leaving them on the tail end of the lead lap and in front of McMurray.

That proved to be the rookie’s demise. The cars in front of McMurray on the outside line were good ones so he thought he’d be OK to stay with them after the green instead of trying to get down to the low side and get mixed in with a group of lapped cars.

He was wrong. When Dave Blaney’s Ford hitched up in front of McMurray entering Turn 1, McMurray had to check up. Cars behind him had to do the same, and Harvick saw the opening. He dove low and took off, with Robby Gordon banging past McMurray in the bargain to get second.

When the yellow came out again for a wreck behind the leaders on that same lap, the cleanup burned off a few of the remaining laps Stewart and others needed to make up ground. The cars that had been on the end of the lead lap came all the way around, too, leaving Harvick nothing but space in front of him for the final restart with 10 laps to go. It was over.

Hours later, Harvick tried to find the words to describe what the day had meant to him.

“Right now,” he said, “it’s like, ‘Whoa! What just happened?'”

Don’t ask us. We have no clue.