You'd end up with enough angry astronauts to reach arm-in-arm and retrieve soil samples from Venus.

So, it's easy to see why tempers flared after the Daytona 500, where 43 drivers spent three hours on a Sunday afternoon checking out the paint schemes of their competitors' deck lids.

	Martin Martin, who the Dura Lube 400 last season, is happy to take the restrictor-plates off this week in Rockingham, N.C.

Thanks to restrictor-plates, shocks and springs, and the inability to shake free of any traffic caused by the technical aversions, NASCAR's premiere event turned into a temper-tantrum of Bristolesque proportions, and it's only February.

"I got lied to," was all Mark Martin could say after Daytona 500 winner Dale Jarrett botched a planned assault on Johnny Benson by hanging him out to dry with 12 laps remaining. Martin was left without a wingman and had to drift aimlessly backward while Jarrett was running off toward the checkered flag.

"I wasn't trying to set him up or anything and I hate that," Jarrett responded. "When Mark pulled up beside me, he didn't shake his fist, and he didn't give me the finger. He threw his hands up like 'what happened?' and I totally understand that. I would have been the same way."

Martin finished fifth, the last of a Ford quintuplet that helped to throw a collective pie in the face of the Chevrolet teams, which mustered only one car in the top 10. Car owner Felix Sabates said he felt like his Monte Carlos were wooden knives in a gunfight.

The pit snafus of Joe Gibbs Racing created some friction between drivers Tony Stewart and Bobby Labonte. Twice, Stewart had run-ins with tires left lying on pit road by Labonte's team. The second of those caused Stewart to hit his tire changer, Mike Lingerfelt, and send him to Halifax Medical Center with a broken leg.

"It's hard to really think about the race when you've got a crew guy who's hurt," Stewart said. "The first thing we did was hit a tire on pit lane, shoved the nose under and that changed the handling of the car. From that point on, everybody fought as hard as they could to try to compensate mechanically for what we couldn't get aerodynamically. We couldn't get any help from anybody. I don't think one person helped us all day."

Family ties were tarnished after Dale Earnhardt and son couldn't get their drafting plans together. "He (Earnhardt Jr.) didn't work at all with nobody," said Earnhardt, trying to explain away why his son and employee had opted at one point to draft with Jarrett instead of dear 'ol dad. "He wanted to pass. That's all he wanted to do, so that's why he finished where he did."

"I wanted to stay with him (Earnhardt) and stay behind him," Junior said. "Everybody got to racing behind me, and it was either pass or be passed."

The inability to pass was the cause of the short tempers.

Counting the opening Twin 125s and the Daytona 500, the Winston Cup Series ran 300 not-so-competitive laps around Daytona International Speedway. There were nine passes for the lead and four of those came during pit stop exchanges.

"I thought the racing was fine," said Rusty Wallace, who finished fourth. "It wasn't single file and three-wide and all that, which the fans like to see, but we don't like to see that as drivers. We like what we had today."

For every driver who left Daytona liking what had unfolded, there were two who didn't.

Busch Series driver Casey Atwood said he'd been ready to go to Rockingham since he got to Daytona, and there were plenty of Winston Cup veterans agreeing with him.