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CONCORD -- When the cars finally stopped spinning and NASCAR got a handle on things down in Alabama, pausing only long enough to make the wrong call, it was time to return racing to the adults.

The boys packed up their tools and waved goodbye to the Alabama girls and loaded their wrecked cars into the haulers and headed up the highway for home. Somewhere during the brief synapse of time between Sunday night and Monday morning, when the seventh day became the first, everyone realized it was time to go back to work.

The long and grinding road that is the modern Sprint Cup series has few homes anymore. Yes, it's still dotted with familiar places -- Daytona, Darlington, Bristol, Talladega -- but few places that actually feel like home.

This is one of them, and Martinsville is only a week away.

We get to this point of the modern season every year and exhale. We've been to Pocono twice and Michigan twice and Dover twice since last we saw a race at Charlotte, and they've made their annual mess of things, bad races leading illogically into more bad races in front of people we don't know and don't want to know.

It all seems to disappear after Memorial Day, all the pageantry and pomp of a populist sport built by people we do know. It careens off course somewhere between Delaware and California and drives headlong into Alabama, where it takes more than mere controversy to refocus. It takes huge wrecks and quite sincere controversy sometimes, and it always spills into Charlotte and Martinsville, where it's sorted out and sent on its way again toward Homestead for some still-unknown reason.

Every year we sit back and watch four months of bad racing and wonder if anyone else is seeing the same thing we are, then simply wait and hope they don't ruin the entire game before it returns. They try every season.

This summer we saw the worst race in the history of stock-car racing at Indianapolis, an embarrassing event that exposed raw threads and the very fabric of the sport before 250,000 people who didn't even know what they were watching. Had it happened at Charlotte, we'd still be screaming about it. Had it happened at Martinsville, they'd have never gotten out of the place.

The appeal of this two-race stretch isn't the racing. Shoot, you can count on one hand the number of great races ever held at Bruton Smith's track, which is now located just in front of Bruton Smith's drag strip off Bruton Smith's boulevard. And yes, it's all a shrine to excess, but it's still Charlotte, and it's still the central nervous system of stock-car racing. It's about the people.

Martinsville has the most interesting track in the world and the most knowledgeable race fans, a place so manly photographers used to stand behind the first-turn azalea bushes and take pictures of cars racing past them about 10 feet away, some with parts hanging off and threatening to fly into the flowers, shooters and all.

I don't know what that means, other than the fact that race photographers are insane, but that's about as clear an indication as I can come up with that people around here know more about racing than anyone else on earth. Last year, I talked a couple of reporters into walking though the fence gate inside the fourth turn at Charlotte where cars go flying by you about 10 yards away, which is a pretty good indication that I'm insane, too, but, again it's an example of how people down this way take the sport a little more seriously than they do in places such as Loudon, N.H., or Long Pond, Pa.

The rain washed out Cup qualifying the other night, and it threatened to turn much of the Charlotte infield into a quagmire, but there were 9,000 RVs already here, lined up and lit up and running high test, idling in the rain as men pitched horseshoes and women fixed dinner and kids ran around unchecked with other kids they'd never seen before, dirty-faced kids covered in red Carolina mud running through campsites of other kids' parents they didn't know, all perfectly safe, oblivious to the ominous signs that life as we know it is coming apart at the seams.

All that's somewhere else this week, somewhere like Kansas or Chicagoland or Nevada or New York. All that will sink in later, about next Sunday night when the sport leaves again and all we'll have to show for it is Monday.

The fans will be here today even though they can't afford it. And they'll be at Martinsville next weekend, too.

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