WINE COUNTRY WHOOP-DE-DOS; Road-course warriors lead the way at crash-strewn Sonoma.(Motorsports)

Byline: Mark Vaughn

When a driver lifts off the gas going into a turn on an oval track, the car, technically, gets "light.'' Just a little. The weight transfers to the front, and the rear end becomes less stable. If that happens on an oval it's usually no big deal. But on the wailing whoop-de-dos of the road course at Infineon Raceway at Sears Point, that lightness becomes an incredible lightness of being, followed sometimes by spins and mayhem.

If you saw it on TV you might have thought Sunday's Dodge/Save Mart 350 was a battle of gas mileage, and you would be right. Jeff Gordon squeezed the last couple of drops out of his tank and won the race, besting a revived Ryan Newman and a gas-gambling Terry Labonte by a scant few car-lengths.

But what made gas mileage so important in the last half of the race were the incidents where the cars got the lightest, in Turns Two and Eight. And there were a lot of those.

The drama started as soon as the race began. On the very first lap, Bobby Labonte and Jamie McMurray each peeled off on opposite sides of the road in Turn Two but didn't collect anyone.

Then the field roared around to the other side of the track and Ken Schrader got a little light going over Turn Eight, then got sideways and wound up collecting a terrific number of entrants. He, Tom Hubert and Sterling Marlin were done for the day. The track was red-flagged for 12 minutes of tow truck work and a precedent was set.

So many cars losing it in Turns Two and Eight meant a number of very convenient yellows-as well as two red flags-that played perfectly into the hands of the leaders.