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Some 48 hours after one of the worst days in stock-car racing history, NASCAR still didn't know what happened. Confused, shocked, embarrassed and probably more than a little concerned, the sanctioning body saw its future flash before its eyes at Indianapolis on a long, regretful Sunday.

Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's competition director who witnessed the disastrous Allstate 400 from behind the pit wall, apologized to the fans Tuesday.

"We're sorry," he said in NASCAR's weekly teleconference. "I can't say enough how sorry we are."

The sport spent the better part of two days apologizing and trying to get to the bottom of the perplexing situation that saw the teams go through 3,200 tires over a weekend that saw the sport's second biggest event go to dust. The tires simply didn't hold up, and NASCAR dropped a caution flag every 10 or 12 laps just to keep the drivers alive.

The nationally televised event was run in a series of drag races that finally ended after 11 race segments and 52 caution laps.

It wasn't the worst day in NASCAR history because no one died. It wasn't even the worst stock-car race at the Brickyard. The truth is, all stock-car races at the Brickyard are terrible. It's the worst race of the season and the most over-hyped race in NASCAR history. The most important thing about it still is that it's run on the same track as the Indianapolis 500 and 250,000 fans show up to watch.

Another fiasco like Sunday's and the grand experiment will be over. They'll never race there again.

The fans poured into the speedway the way they have for all four Brickyard events, Midwestern fans who go to no other race all year, Northern fans who see Indy as some sort of racing Mecca, and Southern fans who go to every race because that's what Southern race fans do. They went in the middle of an economic downturn in America, in the midst of a gasoline price crisis, to the most expensive event on the schedule.

NASCAR has one year to figure out what happened and fix the problem, or the tenuous hold stock-car racing has at Indy will end. NASCAR and Goodyear officials have to get it right. They can't just say they've got it figured out.

To their credit, they didn't make up some story this time. Pemberton said Tuesday he doesn't know what happened. The blame is spread vaguely between track officials who grinded down the racing surface in the past year and Goodyear, which brought the same tire to Indy that it brought last year. NASCAR's own decision not to test its new COT design here before the race also figures in.

But none of that matters right now. What happened Sunday was a disaster because nothing the sanctioning body or Goodyear did seemed to matter.

"That's where we're confused," Pemberton said. "We had an extensive call with Goodyear this morning, I was assured it was the same compound we'd run there the last three races. We'd seen it in the past, but not to that extent."

The tires simply left no rubber on the track, a crucial necessity for racing on a rough, flat surface on a rectangular track built for open-wheel cars. Instead of a dark racing groove common on every track at every race in NASCAR history, the tires left a trail of dust. After three days of racing and practicing and quaifying, after 400 competition miles on Sunday, there was still no groove, still no rubber on the track.

"Indy was the most trouble we've seen in recent history," Pemberton said.

It was the worst in all of history actually. There have been tire problems in the past, tires that were too hard or too soft, tires that wouldn't hold up under conditions, tires that blew up and sent cars into the walls and drivers into the infield care center. Drivers complain almost every week about something to do with the tires. This is the first time the fans complained.

"It's our responsibility being NASCAR to never go through this again," Pemberton said. "Once again, I think it deserves to be said it didn't come off like we hoped and the fans didn't get what they wanted. It won't happen again."

If it does, it will be the last time they race at Indy. And for a lot of fans who didn't want to see NASCAR there to start with, that won't be such a bad thing. For those fans who know the unsaid reality is that the racing at Indy is the worst of any track on the schedule every year, this isn't that big a deal.

But this is a problem of perception for those who see the Brickyard as a special place and the Brickyard 400 as a special event. A race here with only 100,000 fans will be a public relations tragedy for stock-car racing and could thrust it back into the stone-age, when races were almost all run in North Carolina and the drivers were almost all from North Carolina and no one outside the South even knew it was a sport.

What's at stake here is far more important than a few thousand modern-day race fans wanting technological answers to tire issues they don't understand to start with. What's at stake here is the very future of stock-car racing at Indy.

Before the Sunday disaster, NASCAR could call this a major event on a national stage, a great race at a great place with a history and a tradition all its own. The truth was exposed in the strangest way Sunday. Stock-car racing at Indianapolis Motor Speedway is boring, and it goes back all of 14 years.

NASCAR doesn't understand Indy, and Goodyear doesn't understand Indy and core stock-car fans don't understand Indy. But they all know a bad race when they see one, and this was one bad race.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com