Beer and NASCAR

I have to say "God Bless the Marquise". She is my beer brewing buddy lately and (I'm not sure how this happened) we have been getting together on Sundays to drink our beer or brew our beer. For those of you who have not seen her blog, let me tell you one thing about her. She LOVES NASCAR. She is about as fanatical as one can be without getting scary. For those of you who have not yet experienced the joy that is home brewing, I'll give you one little insight, it takes a while. It is not a process that you can complete in an hour. I'm not even talking about the fermenting. There is quite a bit of prep work involved and a little longer "wait" time, just sitting around waiting for the wort to cool of enough to add the yeast. So, since we happen to be brewing on a Sunday AND we have all this extra time, the Marquise has been patiently explaining the weirdness that is NASCAR to me. Every time I think I'm getting a handle on the rules, mores, lingo, you name it, she throws something else at me that screws up my understanding of this phenomenon. She is trying, though. Trying really hard. The good thing about having the Marquise explain anything to you is that you get the full unabridged version. No Cliff notes for her. Not only did I get the recent events, I received instruction in the past glories, rivalries, wrecks and fisticuffs that had occurred over the past 20 years or so. I had to stop her when she started into everyone's wives, children and possible sexual orientation (OK, I didn't stop her on that one) . So far I have learned that the pit crew cannot let the tires go bouncing away, that there are no "passing" rules (it always looked to me like someone would just get out of the way all of a sudden). I'm still trying to figure out how they determine who is in 1st (especially after a major pit stop). Which I guess is really the most important part of the whole damn thing, isn't it? I'm still working on it though. The cars go round and round and round and round and...........