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Here’s how I saw the final. Johnson, who had driven expertly all day, whacked Smith at the start, .026 to .117, and he was way ahead at the 330-foot and eighth-mile, but it was a little tougher to tell as they angled away from the eighth-mile parallel view to the slanted view on the top end. The butts of the bikes were what you saw when Smith’s win light came on. I remember thinking, “Oh shit. I coulda sworn Johnson had him covered.

That was followed by some post-heat chatter from ESPN’s Marty Reid and Mike Dunn, with (I think) Dunn saying something to the effect that he thought Johnson had him. The next images on the screen were a repeat of the race from another angle with one important change, the camera caught the finish directly parallel. No question, about it, Johnson won.

And it wasn’t one of those events where both cars go through the traps glued together with the only chance of determining a winner being an electric one. Such was not the case here. Johnson’s front tire was on the stripe first and by I’d say anywhere from three inches to a near half-foot. Upon seeing that my brain’s car alarm went off, “Bullsh*t! Johnson won that race.”

I’m not like the Burkster. When he sees what to him is an injustice, he goes off like a Super Bowl skyrocket while mine is usually like a bottle rocket. When the big boy saw that, he foamed at the mouth, gargled obscenities, crawled through a plate glass window and dropped two floors off the patio decking and on top of the family Lab, which instantly became a low-riding dachshund.

Dunn saw the repeat footage, and I’m sure to paraphrase he said something like, “Man, I don’t know about that. It looked to me like Johnson won that race.” I suspect that from the e-mail we received early Tuesday morning that several thousand ESPN viewers saw it the same way.

We heard NHRA Senior Vice-President/Racing Operations Graham Light’s company position. In essence, he said that the configuration of Johnson’s bike, probably or most likely in the area of the front end was the culprit here, and that the electric timers were right. That maybe Johnson’s engine broke the beam. Johnson’s Bike was off the mark, not the electricity.

I’ve known Light for a fairly long time, and no matter what you may think of him, he’s an honest guy. He didn’t have anything in for Steve Johnson, who is probably one of the most loyal NHRA racers on the circuit. But he, like me, is capable of making what I thought was a poorly thought-out snap judgment and missing it. He did at Indianapolis.

And for the historians, there is one parallel to the Johnson-Smith rip. Some might remember the 1973 (I think) NHRA Summernationals where the late Marvin Schwartz’s noseless rear-engine car clearly beat his opponent to the finish line, that being determined by magazine photos in the trades a month or so later. The light came on in the opponent’s lane and that was that. There was no top-end TV cameras back then so the argument that Schwartz’s spare front piped car was not caught by the beams held up. My attitude was then what it is now.: I don’t care how you cut the cake, Schwartz beat his foe to the finish line, the whole point of a drag race.