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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- With its marquee player lost in the clouds, and the fireworks of the opening event getting soggy, NASCAR pulled the plug on the Daytona 500 on Sunday night.

Matt Kenseth was in the lead, and Kevin Harvick was in second, and both cars were under blankets on pit road as rain pelted the sport on its grandest stage. A hard downpour and a shrug of the shoulders ended it all at 6:46 p.m.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. had a funny look on his face as he walked away mumbling about Brian Vickers. The two North Carolinians came together at the race's pivotal moment on lap 125, and everything that happened next is open for speculation. Earnhardt blamed Vickers, and Vickers said Earnhardt should've been parked and then NASCAR said nothing at all.

It had already been a long day for all three principals. Vickers was all over the place, and Earnhardt's concentration was somewhere other than Daytona International Speedway, and NASCAR just wanted the rain to come so everybody could get home without a Monday green-white-checkered finish. The last thing it wanted was a controversy.

But it was too late.

With rain looming and the race against the weather on everyone's mind, Earnhardt dropped below the yellow line at the end of the backstretch to avoid Vickers, who'd dropped toward the line to block Junior's oncoming Chevrolet.

Chaos had ensued.

An odd conglomeration of cars had wedged into the third turn with raindrops falling and teams screaming at drivers over the radio about weather and traffic. The imperfect storm had arrived.

Earnhardt veered hard right and clipped the left-rear quarter panel of Vickers' car, sending him sliding up the track with the entire Daytona 500 field suddenly blocked by a sideways Toyota. Cars slammed off walls and through the grass and into each other, bouncing on and off the pavement and sending mud and sand high into the night. Vickers and nine other cars slowed under the third-turn banking, and Earnhardt drove away unrepentant. "It's kind of sad," Vickers said. "To wreck somebody intentionally like that in front of the entire field is really kind of dangerous."

Hard to say if it was intentional or not, but it was clear Earnhardt took the opportunity to tap Vickers out of anger or necessity. Either way, while the sport paused to see what NASCAR would do, the sanctioning body was watching the weather map.

"I was trying to recover my car," Earnhardt explained later. "I got into him."

Vickers wanted Earnhardt to be penalized, and there was some sentiment for that among the competitors. But by then, Vickers had angered his share of the field, too. And his move to block Earnhardt while the two were a lap down was hardly a defendable position.

Earnhardt had no defense for any of his boneheaded moments.

He had one of the fastest cars in the field, maybe the fastest, but he completely missed his pits on one stop -- "I couldn't see it!" he said -- and pitted outside his box on another -- "By one inch!" he reasoned -- which explained why he was a lap down to start with.

He chose the wrong line when he needed to make moves, reacted late when teammates needed a push and completely lost his mind every time he had to pit. And based on a penalty NASCAR handed out earlier in the weekend when Jason Leffler was penalized five laps for "aggressive driving" during the Nationwide race, Earnhardt probably should've been parked.

Instead, the focus went back to the clouds and the race against the elements. Kenseth started screaming about the rain that only he seemed to see, and then he suddenly found himself headed for the lead with the field blurring in his back window from what everyone else realized was real rain. He used a push from Harvick, who won the 2007 race with a push from Kenseth, and prayed for a downpour.

He'd started 39th in a field of 43, hadn't won in more than a year and had no idea he was about to win this one. Kenseth is hardly a great super-speedway driver and had never won a restrictor-plate race.

"I feel like a lot of times I make mistakes," he said. "I don't get my car in the right place at the right time."

With his car finally in the right place at the right time Sunday, and everyone else making mistakes for a change, the weather arrived. Suddenly another car went sliding down the backstretch, and a caution flag flew with 53 laps to go.

After a wet procession ended with the cars coming to a stop on pit road, the Daytona 380 came to an end. Kenseth pulled his Ford to a stop and stayed in it while the crew covered it in a tarp. Less than 20 minutes later, in the darkness of his own thoughts, he was declared the winner.

Earnhardt, who negotiated the final stop perfectly, finished 27th on a day when it looked like he wasn't thinking at all.

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