Some day, perhaps, NASCAR’s integrity will be beyond reproach.

Some day, it might be possible to watch a race and believe with every confidence that the people who are deciding whether a caution flag should be displayed are looking solely at whether the track is safe for racing in making that call.

That, of course, is the only reason a yellow flag should ever be thrown, and one should be thrown every single time there’s an unsafe situation on the track, regardless of other consequences. It shouldn’t matter who an early caution might help or who a late one might hurt.

That day is not here.

When you look at what happened in Sunday’s Bass Pro Shops 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, you can’t help but wonder about some things.

Why did NASCAR throw a yellow for debris that nobody but NASCAR seemed to see just before Dale Earnhardt Jr. got trapped a lap down for a second time early in the race?

A call like that could easily be defended if NASCAR consistently threw cautions whenever there is any suspicion something untoward has happened on the track. But in the final moments of the race, when Clint Bowyer’s car was scraping the wall and showering sparks, no yellow was seen. Certainly that incident created at least as much suspicion of danger as unspecified debris did more than 225 laps earlier.

One more time, if the track isn’t safe for racing, put the yellow flag out. If it is, don’t try to manipulate competition by finding an excuse to slow the field. More to the point, don’t even allow that possibility to be considered.

There’s no doubt that NASCAR would get great benefit from a championship by Dale Earnhardt Jr., especially this year.

When ESPN ramps up its hype machine on NASCAR’s behalf in 2007, Earnhardt Jr. will get the Terrell Owens-LeBron James-Barry Bonds wall-to-wall treatment. If he’s the reigning champion that approach will be much easier for the cable sports network to justify and for NASCAR to tacitly support.

Every intelligent fan knows that, so by default any call that seems to benefit the red No. 8 Chevrolet is looked at with skepticism.

Frankly, as long as people involved on a day-to-day basis with NASCAR’s business and marketing decisions also sit in the control tower each week making calls on rules and race procedures, that skepticism is warranted.

The people who actually run the races must be entirely separate from the people who make business decisions for the sport. At the very least, there needs to be at least the appearance of independence among those calling the equivalent of the sport’s balls and strikes.

What we have now is a sport so permeated with commercial conflicts of interest it’s comical. Remember the whole silliness about the PowerAde bottles in “Gatorade Victory Lane?” Drivers were being warned about that in the prerace meetings where rules and procedures are discussed. That’s absurd.

As long as pit road speed limits appear to be selectively enforced and as long as the use of a caution flag appears to hinge on the who and the when as much as the what, many questions that should seem preposterous are valid.

That’s just a shame.