Sunday night’s Coca-Cola 600 went exactly the way I thought it would.

Why, then, do I still feel like I have no idea what happened?

You knew that, with the smaller fuel cells requiring so many pit stops, it was going to be a disjointed race, especially with the tires so hard that it allowed teams to do no tires or two tires just about anytime they pleased.

For example, in the final 100 laps of the race, Jeff Burton took only fuel on one stop and got the lead. The next time he came in and got tires and was 13th on the restart. It was less about strategy and more about which ping-pong balls blew to the top of the lottery machine.

Looking back now, it seems that having all of those pit stops actually was a blessing to teams that made mistakes on pit road in the first, say, two-thirds of the race.

Kasey Kahne, who wound up winning, and Matt Kenseth, who finished fifth, both had to make extra trips down pit road in the first 100 laps with loose lug nuts. Because they made so many stops and could employ various strategies, however, they made up for that with relative ease.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeremy Mayfield both were penalized a lap for pitting outside their pit boxes, but both recovered to finish in the top 15.

The most costly pit road mistakes, though, were made on the final stop by Scott Riggs’ team. First, Riggs stalled the car. Then the jack and fuel can got carried outside the box as the crew tried to push Riggs’ Dodge away.

That brought him back for a stop-and-go penalty and led to a 13th-place finish. Without that, Riggs might have been there in the mix at the end when Kahne won.

I do, however, believe the best car on the track won the race.

Kahne said after celebrating his victory that the two cars he was worried about beating when it came time to decide things were Riggs’ No. 10 and the No. 48 Chevrolet of Jimmie Johnson, who finished second.

Kahne’s victory also allowed Evernham to become the first car owner other than Rick Hendrick or Jack Roush to win the Coca-Cola 600 since Robert Yates won with Dale Jarrett back in 1996.

With another May at Charlotte behind us, the question now becomes what’s next?

“The fact that the trucks and the Busch cars ran the big fuel cells and the Cup cars didn’t, that didn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Johnson said after the race.

He’s right, of course. The 14-gallon fuel cells used Sunday weren’t about safety. They were statistical aspartame, designed to artificially sweeten the appearance of competition on the track’s new surface. It worked, in that regard, with 37 lead changes among 16 drivers.

How much softer can Goodyear go with the tire to make it more conducive to racing but still strong enough to be safe? Considerably, it seems, and if Goodyear can’t make a tire that’s both safe and good enough to race on, maybe it’s time for NASCAR to find a company that can.