Dale Jarrett was starting to unbuckle his safety harness so he could climb out of his No. 88 Ford after wrecking in Sunday’s Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire International Speedway.

Thankfully, he changed his mind.

“My spotter told me to stay buckled because they were coming,” Jarrett said.

“They” were the race leaders, being chased by a group of lapped cars intent on getting back on the lead lap. Everybody had a different idea about what he was doing, and Jarrett was a sitting duck.

The closest thing NASCAR has to a rule governing that situation is the so-called “gentlemen’s agreement,” which strictly defined is a policy by which the race leader is given the responsibility of determining whether anyone should get back a lap.

After the race, though, the gentlemen involved disagreed strongly both on what happened and what should have.

Bill Elliott was leading the race at the time, and he slowed dramatically as he brought the field back to the yellow line. Was Elliott honoring a deal to allow a lapped Bobby Labonte to get a lap back, or just trying to do the right thing?

“You need to slow down and kind of give guys a break with the accident,” Elliott said. “You know, trying to get the medical people to those guys. If I’m in a wreck out there on the track, I’d want them to be able to get to me as fast as they possibly could.”

Michael Waltrip was running behind Elliott on the lead lap, though, and thought something else was going on.

“One car, the 9 (Elliott), is leading the race,” Waltrip said. “All he has to do is to go hammer down through the accident scene. That takes 20 cars out of the equation of getting their lap back.

“When the leader stops, like Bill did, everybody thinks they’re going to get a lap back and then you have a gold rush coming to a guy who’s sitting wrecked in the middle of the track. … It was stupid.”

There should be a rule to prevent such madness, but it’s more complicated than that.

You want to revert to the order on the last green-flag lap? That means anyone who’s involved in a crash suffers no competitive consequence as long as he can drive away, since he’d go right back to where he was running before he wrecked.

You want to freeze the field in the positions they’re in when the yellow comes out? NASCAR says the technology to do that without having split-second judgment calls from the naked eye isn’t there yet.

New NASCAR chairman and chief executive officer Brian France said Sunday that working out that technology so a workable rule can emerge from the mess the “gentlemen’s agreement” has become is one of the first things he’d like to handle.

While France is at it, he should also make it illegal for cars to pass each other on pit road as they try to hurry into the pit boxes. That’s what led to the scary incident Sunday that had Johnson’s crew scattering like bowling pins after Jeff Gordon cut inside of Waltrip and got bumped sideways when Waltrip went into his stall.

There’s nothing complicated about changing that rule.