Weekend in Sports Purgatory: Daytona 500

I have no one to blame but myself for my own ignorance about cars. I have no one to blame but the broadcasters of NASCAR for my own ignorance about NASCAR. Here are my complaints.

1) There is apparently some "team element" to this sport where guys whose cars are owned by the same ownership group draft and block for each other, except nowhere on the constantly revolving ticker does it say whose on what team. Who are the Roush guys? Who are Joe Gibbs' guys? I'd like to root for Roush-FENWAY racing and they had some guys in the Top 10 towards the end but no one told me who so I still don't have "a guy" to root for. And that will never be properly explained to me, how people get to root for "their guy"?

2) For all the "gearhead" talk during the race. Could we get ONE Human Interest story? I'm stunned I'm asking for this in an individual sport and I've seen enough ESPN pieces on football players' whose family members have died of something to know that these stories must exist. How much more popular could this be if we were given reasons to root for individuals. All I know about any of these guys is that Carl Edwards banged Amanda Beard and had a brief cameo appearance on '24'

This sport got popular without ever having to explain their product to new fans, so I'm behind the curve on NASCAR and may forever be.

Anyway, the 6th Caution on the 198th lap (telling me that watching 99% of this race was a waste of time) brings us to the exciting "Green-White-Checkered" finish, where the restart takes us to the second to last lap than the final lap to end the race. The equivalent of Overtime in NASCAR. I felt like I was listening to Cotton McKnight during "Sudden Death" of the Las Vegas International Dodgeball Open saying "We haven't had one of these since the 1952 Helsinki Open...and we all know how THAT turned out!"

Kevin Harvick beats out perennial leader Mark Martin who is apparently 60 years old and has never won a Daytona 500 by .123 of a second. Pretty exciting, I must say.