Have At It, Boys. NASCAR Gets What It Asked For. Payback’s a Bitch. (Choose your headline.)

The motorsports media is running off in its sensational misguided direction as usual, about the finish of yesterday’s NASCAR race, the Kobalt Tools 500 at Atlanta, won by Kurt Busch. But AutoSnark has a sharper take.

Keep in mind, we were there in 1979 when Cale Yarborough took out Donnie Allison on the last lap of the Daytona 500, after Allison belated tried to block him, which they still show the video of in NASCAR commercials, to keep the turnstiles spinning.

Yesterday the handsome, charming, articulate, acrobatic, talented, two-faced Carl Edwards took out the hard-charging young Penske Racing driver Brad Keselowski (shades of Dale Earnhardt, ironically—or not—the protégé of Dale Earnhardt Jr.), near the finish of the race, causing an airborne crash of the Penske Dodge Charger that Edwards will face the NASCAR hammer (or not) for, this week.

But it’s the backstory that matters.

Last April they were racing to the poised checkered flag for the win at Talladega. Keselowski pulled out to pass, high; Edwards blocked him. Keselowski dove low; Edwards moved down to block again, and Keselowski’s right front fender nudged Edwards’ left rear, sending Edwards’ Ford Fusion airborne and into the catch fence, and eight spectators to the hospital. Blame was not placed on Keselowski for the contact. Edwards just tried to block too late, a second time. Edwards blamed NASCAR.

“NASCAR just puts us in this box, and we’ll race like this until we kill somebody,” he said.

The box he was talking about was the situation where on the last lap, especially between Turn Four and the finish line, a driver racing for the win often has only two choices: lose or crash. Crash or lose. They can’t decide which is worse, is the basic problem.

So yesterday, Edwards stepped outside the box. Today the media is going on about how he retaliated against Keselowski. But no, he retaliated against NASCAR.

Here’s our case:

After the Talladega crash, he said, “Brad did everything right. If he drives below the line, he loses, so what’s a guy supposed to do? You end up having to wreck people or get second and none of us want to do that.”

But there’s more alleged motive for retaliation. Early in yesterday’s Atlanta race, Keselowski again nudged Edwards, same right front fender against same left rear, sending Edwards into Joey Logano and the garage for repairs. “We both had a part in it and it’s not his fault,” he said, as he waited for his car to be fixed.

He’s right. We watched the video. We stopped it. Again, Edwards came down on Keselowski. Who gave him no room.

Okay Carl, in your own words, you have no grounds for retaliation. So why did you wreck Keselowski with a couple laps to go, when he was running in sixth place and you were 155 laps behind?

There appears to be only one logical explanation. NASCAR. He wanted to show them. (However, again, there are those two faces of his, but it’s almost too easy to write it off to his inner road rage. We remember the Kenseth incident, but won’t get into it.)

Said Keselowski,

“He about killed me and a couple thousand people in the grandstands. While I was up in the air, I thought for sure I was going to kill someone.”

Have At It Boys, the headlines say today, quoting NASCAR from last month, after they said they were going to let the drivers police themselves. Are they nuts? Setting no boundaries with racedrivers? NASCAR explained that he fans want to see contact. Oh, that explains it, they’re not nuts, they’re just hypocritical.

That “police yourselves” message seemed to refer mostly to bump-drafting, particularly in the turns. Last year, NASCAR did not allow bump-drafting, at least not extended nor in the turns, on the grounds that it was dangerous—and of course dangerous means deadly, at these speeds. But this year, aggressive driving, contact, extended bump-drafting … it’s all good, because the fans like action.

So when Carl Edwards, running 155 laps down, turned into Brad Keselowski and sent him flying upside-down, he was only striking a blow against NASCAR’S hypocrisy.

The only problem was that Keselowski’s car took flight toward the stands, “which was not at all what I expected,” said Edwards.

Or … then again … he might have been doing exactly what NASCAR, in its wisdom, wanted from the drivers: self-policing. As Juan Pablo Montoya pointed out, last year Keselowski “wrecked a lot of people, so I’m sure a lot of people wanted to pay him back. Looking at the TV, somebody did.”