A Winston Cup race at Talladega Superspeedway is the world’s most complicated lottery drawing.

Instead of pingpong balls, 43 cars are loaded into a 2.66-mile barrel and blown around in the air. Every 50 seconds or so somebody takes a picture of where each car is in relation to all the others. When the 188th picture is taken, it’s over.

Michael Waltrip started 18th in last Sunday’s EA Sports 500. He was 30th after 10 laps, 23rd after 20 laps and 27th after 30. He was third after 40 laps, fourth after 50 and 14th after 60. His position at each ensuing 10-lap interval was fifth, 10th, 22nd, 21st, 13th, fourth, 16th, third, 21st, 11th, third, first and, at the finish, first.

Things go pretty much the same way at Daytona, too, the only other track where Cup cars use carburetor restrictor plates. A car running second on one lap very easily can be 12th on the next if its driver gets trapped in the wrong line or is hung out by himself with no drafting partner.

Because of the almost random nature of this type of racing, it’s even more remarkable that two cars from the same team now have won nine of the past 12 plate races.

Waltrip’s victory Sunday was his first at Talladega, but he’s won three times in the past three years at Daytona. Dale Earnhardt Jr. had won four straight at Talladega before finishing second to Waltrip, and he also won at Daytona in July 2001.

Clearly, Dale Earnhardt Inc. spends a great deal of time and money perfecting its Chevrolets for restrictor-plate racing. Nine of DEI’s 14 all-time Cup victories have come in plate races, with Earnhardt Jr. winning five and Waltrip four.

As Waltrip and Earnhardt Jr. have piled up the plate-race victories in the past three seasons, finishing first and second four times as they did Sunday, the question has always been what kind of “secret” has DEI found?

Is there magic in the motors the team brings to plate tracks? Has DEI found a way to thwart, if only ever so slightly, the horsepower-limiting characteristics of the restrictor plates? Or, as the most fervent conspiracists believe, is there simply something underhanded about the way NASCAR hands out the plates in the first place?

As interesting as it may be to speculate about the one true source for DEI’s plate-race success, the real explanation is almost certainly far more pedestrian.

“Dale Earnhardt was the best at Daytona and Talladega,” Waltrip said. “He knew that to be the best, you have to have the best cars. When he started DEI, he made sure everyone knew that we would have the best restrictor-plate cars. He was going to have cars that were faster than everybody else’s to give the drivers a chance to win.”

So, most likely, the real answer is that DEI’s Daytona and Talladega cars are as good as anybody else’s in all areas of what makes a plate-race car run well — aerodynamics, handling, engine and so on.

Even so, nine wins in 12 tries still is a remarkable record that speaks volumes about how Waltrip and Earnhardt Jr. drive those good cars at these two tracks. Give me Tiger Woods’ golf clubs and I’m still not going to win the Masters.