WEAVER: Rainy road race nice change of pace

If you enjoyed Saturday's rain-soaked Xfinity Series Mid-Ohio Challenge, you're in luck.

By all accounts, NASCAR officials were pleased with how the race played out, with part-timer Justin Marks surviving treacherous conditions to win his first national touring event. This wasn't the first time NASCAR had contested a race on rain tires, but it was the first time a race went nearly start-to-finish under a constant deluge.

The end result was a degree of carnage and silliness.

There were eight cautions, and 32 of the 75 laps were run under yellow. So while there was a great deal of twisted metal, there was also an equal amount of technical excellence, especially from a handful of drivers who do not have a lot of experience on road courses, much less a rain-soaked one.

That was the beauty of the Mid-Ohio Challenge – drivers could overcome engineering and simply drive their way to the front of the field on talent alone. Marks was nearly flawless on Saturday, and his road course background kept him in control of the race.

But consider the likes of Andy Lally and Alon Day (pictured, racing side-by-side with Xfinity regular Ryan Reed), who continually drove their underfunded machines to the top 10 on sheer willpower. Day was driving a Carl Long Dodge for cyring out loud, and relished the opportunity to do what he's done in the NASCAR Whelen Euro Series over the past several years.

"I knew some guys would be slow in the rain," Day said after the race. "I have experience on the rain in Europe. I used to drive in the rain all the time, so I was really happy. You can't imagine how excited I was. But then the second rain came and someone spun and hit my front suspension and it became impossible to drive the car. I had a shot at a top-5."

In a Carl Long Dodge.

With that said, the race wasn't for everyone, with some observers believing fans shouldn't have to watch in the rain, nor should the slip-and-slide conditions represent the NASCAR brand moving forward. Second-place finisher Sam Hornish Jr. even said "it was awful and I don't want to do it again."

But Steve O'Donnell, the league's vice president and chief racing development officer, believes the day is coming when a race at the highest level will mirror what took place on Saturday – much to the chagrin of one Sprint Cup crew chief.

Remember that it wasn't that long ago that NASCAR road course races made some of the best in the discipline look silly due to the overall lack of experience at turning right and left on Sundays. But that's changed thanks to the addition of several road courses joining the schedule of every NASCAR campaign from K&N to Xfinity.

This is seemingly destined to become the norm whenever it rains at a NASCAR road course, and the best drivers in stock car racing will adjust, because that's what they've always done.

With that said, don't expect a rain race on ovals anytime soon, even at a place like Martinsville Speedway where relatively short straightaways and slow corners suggest it could work. The problem is that the possibility is unprecedented, and Goodyear doesn't have an existing product to take on such an endeavor, according to NASCAR senior vice president of competition Scott Miller.

"Well, the speeds are just too high and developing a tire to try to do something like that is something that's never been done before," Miller said Monday on SiriusXM NASCAR radio. "So there are just too many challenge there. The speeds are just too high, especially down the straightaways, regardless of if the track is dry and then getting to the corner with that amount of speed and load is something that no one has tried to tackle from a development standpoint."

But still, these are exciting times that we live in considering that a NASCAR race of any kind can be contested in the wet. It was rewarding to see a driver with a different skill set (like Marks) get rewarded for them and perhaps the day will come that technology will evolve to see such an event on an oval.

For now, Saturday was fun and the first such race for Cup will be a welcome addition to the NASCAR vernacular.