MARTINSVILLE - A foggy shroud hung over Martinsville Speedway all day, from the time traffic began to back up on the highway on the way in for a day at the race until the slow procession of cars made their way home.

Most of the race fans who came to Martinsville on a dreary Sunday went home without knowing why the day ended as it did. It ended with no celebration in Victory Lane and only a half-hearted celebration on the track. Jimmie Johnson won the race, and his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon finished ninth. Then, after a brief handshake on pit road, they were led away from the track.

The news was numbing. A plane had crashed a few miles from the track. It was a plane carrying team and family members of Hendrick Motorsports.

This is largely a family sport, despite all the corporate trappings and scripted commercialism, and the racing family of Rick Hendrick is one of the immediate relatives of the sport itself.

The news out of Bull Mountain, a small rise near Stuart on the edge of the Smith River Valley, was that 10 people were on board when the plane went down in heavy fog on an approach to Blue Ridge Regional Airport.

The race at Martinsville began almost an hour after the plane was lost. No one at the track knew of the crash, not the race team or the family or NASCAR, until authorities contacted the racing organization sometime after the race began.

The drivers of the Hendrick racing team were not told. Few people knew for sure who was on the plane, and even in the hours after the race the details out of the fog were incomplete. Thousands of fans watched Johnson spin his tires in a brief display and then they awaited the postrace celebration.

Within minutes of winning the race, Johnson and Gordon were taken away along with drivers Terry Labonte and Brian Vickers to the NASCAR trailer. A brief announcement was made to the press. Little was explained to the fans, who were watching the stage being set up for the Victory Lane celebration and then were watching the stage being pulled away by a tractor.

"Earlier today the FAA informed us that a Hendrick Motorsports plane bound for Martinsville, they lost contact with that airplane,'' explained Jim Hunter, NASCAR's chief spokesman. "We don't have any details. The FAA and the NTSB, along with the state of Virginia, are investigating. And we don't have any details. We have been in contact with the entire Hendrick organization, including Rick Hendrick, and we're sort of praying for them right now. That's the reason Jimmie Johnson didn't go to Victory Lane. That's the reason the other Hendrick drivers and crews did not do what they normally do after a race.''

NASCAR offered little else and went home. So did the racing family and the thousands of fans who came to watch.

The details came out slowly as the traffic filed back through the roads leading away from the track, some headed back through Greensboro on the way to Charlotte, where the flight originated Sunday morning. Some headed west, toward Bull Mountain, where state police were keeping people away from the roads leading to the scene.

The names of those involved will not mean much to the casual observer of the sport, but every race fan who was here Sunday and every race fan who was not will understand that it was a family tragedy in a sport that has more than its share. The names of Alan Kulwicki, Davey Allison, Curtis Turner and Tony Bettenhauser come to mind. The short lives of so many others who are drawn to the speed and the danger of racing give this sport a macabre feel. Few realize they're joining a family of racers.

Most know Sunday's crash involved a family that has known more than its share of tragedy in recent years and a racing organization that knows it must race again in a week. A day that began in fog ended in sadness at the beginning of a race week that will end in another race weekend in another city.