There are rookie mistakes. Then there are rookie mistakes.

In October 2002, minutes after winning the second Winston Cup race he had ever run — the UAW-GM 500 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway — Jamie McMurray burst from inside his car in Victory Lane.

He jumped across the hood, spun around and started celebrating with his team. High-fives and hugs all around. Bad mistake.

“I asked him if he wouldn’t mind crawling back on top of his car so he could face the cameras,” said Scott Cooper, who coordinates Victory Lane activities at Lowe’s. “He said, ‘No problem.’ He just hadn’t been there before.”

That’s the kind of logistical hoop that Cooper, and others like him around the Winston Cup and Grand National Series circuits, jump through every week.

“The person who runs Victory Lane is so organized, he could have won the Iraq war in one day,” Lowe’s Motor Speedway president H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler said. “And without anyone getting killed.”

Part traffic cop and part Broadway stage choreographer, Cooper runs a production that serves the oft-competing interests of those who want an immediate piece of the winning driver: sponsors, fans and the media.

“You have to recognize that this is a very special moment for a driver,” Cooper said. “You don’t want to do anything that will lose that feeling for him. You’ve got to do everything you can to accommodate it.”

After taking the flag and wheeling his car into Victory Lane, the winning driver must run a gauntlet of posed photographs with the trophy; live track, television and radio interviews; more photos, then interviews with print media.

Jamie McMurray celebrates while surrounded by cameras, officials and crew members. His first career Winston Cup victory came in the 2002 UAW-GM Quality 500.

It ends with the infamous “hat dance,” a precise, assembly-line process in which the driver is photographed wearing the hats of dozens of sponsors.

If it’s a night race, the Victory Lane process is compressed to about 30 minutes because of media deadlines. The work after an afternoon race might take 90 minutes.

The hat dance comes after the photos are taken and interviews given. It often offers an odd marriage of driver and sponsorship interests. When Jeff Gordon won the 1998 spring race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, his first act in Victory Lane was to take a drink of Pepsi-Cola, one of his primary sponsors, amid dozens of logos and bottles of race-sponsor Coca-Cola in the background.

Within minutes, however, Gordon was wearing a Coke hat.

“Gordon is one of the more gracious guys,” Cooper said. “He paused with the Coke brass. He won’t cross that line and be uncooperative about that.”

Most drivers understand the predicament. If Coors Light’s Sterling Marlin wins a race sponsored by a rival beer company, it’s not much of a problem for him.

“Yes and no,” said Marlin, who has made 10 visits to Victory Lane in his Winston Cup career. “You really don’t know what’s going on until they put the hats on you. It’s real quick, but the sponsor’s people have their eye on it.

“If Bud sponsors a race, I don’t think (Coors) would have any problem if I put a Bud hat on and made any pictures.”

But sponsors probably don’t want that kind of image to last.

“I don’t think Lowe’s would want (Home Depot’s) Tony Stewart in a Lowe’s hat for too long,” Cooper said. That’s exactly what happened when Stewart won last weekend’s UAW-GM 500 at the Lowe’s track.

Some drivers’ hat dances take longer than others, Cooper said, specifically those from multi-sponsored teams like Joe Gibbs Racing and Hendrick Motorsports.

“If (Joe Gibbs Racing’s driver) Bobby Labonte wins, you can tack on 30 minutes,” Cooper said.

And that adds to the photographers’ workload in Victory Lane.

“But the main thing,” said Harold Hinson, who shoots for Lowe’s Motor Speedway and Dale Earnhardt Inc., among other teams, “is you hope the drivers look our way when they get out of the car.”

Are you listening, Jamie McMurray?