The first 150 laps of the Daytona 500 was like watching drivers circle the lot at the grocery store politely waiting for parking spots to open up.

Then the sun went down, a full moon popped up and everybody started behaving like the Wolfman – suddenly in a hurry and only too eager to mix it up.

The last 50 laps featured five wrecks, all involving multiple cars, and small wonder. There was no room. With three dozen circuits left, the top 20 were separated by a second. With six laps to go, the field was as tightly packed as it was at the start.

At the finish, as car parts, smoke and sparks flew through the air behind them like the climactic chase scene from “The Road Warrior,” Kevin Harvick and Mark Martin were racing side by side at around 200 mph separated by the length of a car hood. Seconds later, providing a perfect exclamation point, Clint Bowyer skidded across the line with his car upside down – and on fire.

The guys calling the race on Fox, with decades of NASCAR experience between them, scoured their collective memory banks to come up with an ending nearly this wild.

One referenced “Joey Chitwood,” the daredevil who performed death-defying auto stunts beginning in the 1940s, and whose best work is still available on youtube.com. Another nominated the 1979 Daytona 500, when Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison locked up in a final-lap battle, spun into the infield, started throwing insults and then punches as Allison’s brother, Bobby, pulled over and joined the fray. The fight garnered so much attention that a nation watching the first-ever live broadcast of a 500-mile race barely noticed Richard Petty making up a half-lap deficit and sneaking across the finish line.

Grand as that race was, driver-turned-broadcaster Darrell Waltrip came up with an even better one.

“This finish,” he said, recalling last year’s NASCAR-inspired hit comedy, “It’s ‘Ricky Bobby.’ It couldn’t have been any better.”

Nor better-timed.

Think back to the events of last week, when NASCAR czar Brian France gave his upbeat state-of-the-sport address. He boasted about new TV partners, new sponsors, a new carmaker coming on-board to challenge America’s Big Three, and the additional responsibilities all that money rolling in would place on the people who make the sport go.

Then an hour or so later, his handlers announced four teams caught cheating would lose their crew chiefs for Sunday’s race. A fifth team, headed by owner-driver Michael Waltrip, was busted the following day. That may have been the most embarrassing development of all, since he was fronting for new series-entrant Toyota, a manufacturer that knew little about NASCAR’s notorious past and liked seeing its reputation smudged with oil even less.

The funny thing is that hijinks have been on the way out the last half-dozen or so years, as NASCAR embarked on an NFL-style expansion plan, growing more homogeneous than homespun, more choreographed than chaotic in the bargain.

But this race was a throwback in the best sense of the word, at least once the sun went down and the cars found their grip on the ancient concrete oval. Drivers banged into the walls, off each other and the crazier it got, the more chances they took.

“Wildest thing I’ve been part of,” Harvick said after officials posted his margin of victory at .020 seconds, “in a long time.”

Martin, the sentimental favorite, was trying to win his first Daytona title in 23 tries.

“We were inches or feet or whatever. We were short. It was so close,” he said finally, “but it was second.”

It’s small consolation, but it was as good and honorable a second-place finish as there’s been in NASCAR. Even so, Martin could have whined about the lack of a caution flag seconds from the end. As he battled Harvick to the line, the final, seven-car crash was exploding just a few hundred yards behind them. Had the yellow flag been dropped, the field would have been frozen and Martin would have won. Instead, the green flag flew.

“I was ahead of it all,” Martin conceded, “It was pretty decent where I was sitting.”

And because Martin was a standup guy, France, Harvick and all the rest of the employees in his traveling circus are sitting pretty. Since the Daytona 500 is NASCAR’s biggest event, the season effectively starts with its Super Bowl and builds momentum from there. Now there’s a great race, a little controversy and enough highlights to fill up a week’s worth of the nightly programs that ESPN has trotted out to promote the sport it just bought back into.

A few years back, France was asked whether all the changes he embarked on, from increased corporate involvement to a crackdown on the drivers’ conduct, language and under-the-hood shenanigans wasn’t driving his core audience away. He replied that coming up with magical moments wouldn’t be tough so long as men and machines remained a volatile mix.

“Racing has always had them. The trick now,” he said, “is to keep them coming on a bigger stage.”

So far, so good.

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org