COLUMN: Is this exciting, or what? (Or what?)

RICHMOND, Va. - A lot of bullets were dodged at Richmond International Raceway on Saturday night.

With imagination, a man could almost hear the richochets.

Though it was a struggle, enough tickets ended up being sold for track officials to declare a 33rd consecutive sellout. Nothing offered more testimony to the availability than the avocations being launched by the men working the streets leading into the track. Men - there could have been women, too, but I didn't see any - who one might normally suspect to be scalpers were, instead, hawking boxes of pizzas and doughnuts, not to mention speedway T-shirts. The local paper even ran a feature on the sad plight of the scalpers.

Makes the heart bleed, doesn't it?

Scalpers have their own little method of avoiding self-incrimination, of course. They hold up signs written in simple code. "I Need Tickets" means, of course, "I Got Tickets" in scalper lingo. This time the pitch was different.

Yo, man, I got these double-glazed crullers, and I can let you have a box for $12. My buddy's got a medium Domino's, pepperoni and double sauce. Let you have it for $10, no questions asked.

A weather front conveniently split, just as optimistic local weathermen predicted, and the green flag fell amidst the backdrop of a lovely pastel sunset of purple and pink.

The weather is beautiful, darling. Wish you were here.

Not everything, of course, was beautiful. Jeff Gordon, for instance, started the race ugly, falling a lap down almost immediately. Well, by Gordon standards, falling a lap down almost never happens at all, and being a lap behind with about 34 miles in the books is akin to the New England Patriots giving up a pair of touchdowns before the offense even takes the field.

As usual, getting into the track was a nightmare, perhaps aggravated by the availability of tickets on race day for the first time in years. Cars were backed up a mile or so on Laburnum Avenue at noon. The race started at 7:45 or so, but who could watch a race without the obligatory seven hours of tailgating?

Once upon a time, no one "rode around" at a short track. That was the look of the Dan Lowry 400's first 200 laps.

On the one hand, today's stars brag about how competitive it is, how they have to race hard every single lap, and then, almost in the same breath, they claim the races are too long because, in a lot of them, they just ride around.

"To me, some of those races, you don't even race until the end because too many things can happen," said Kasey Kahne. "You just save your stuff and wait until the end; that happens a lot of times."

Hmm. Is it run hard every lap, or save the car to the end? It can't be both.

They even had a debris caution on lap 128. It looked like the guy in the truck just leaned over and acted like he was picking something up. Denny Hamlin, dominating the race at the time, screamed bloody murder on the radio.

Suspicious debris cautions? At Richmond?

That stuff's supposed to happen at Michigan, not Richmond. NASCAR isn't supposed to have to conjure up excitement at the so-called "Action Track."