MARTINSVILLE -- The rain poured Saturday, and the creeks rose and the red-clay valley filled with noise.

Racing returned to its roots this weekend in the midst of a Chase no one seems all that interested in watching.

Of course, there have been times when all was not well before. But we just weren't shown the signs. This week, amid the rain and mud and swirling colors of half-mile madness on the banks of the Marrowbone, things got all stirred up by some unexpected characters and we were given a brief glimpse behind NASCAR's curtain.

We saw about what we thought we would see.

Our own Dustin Long is the cause of all this. He's a trouble-maker from way back, a holdover from the days when the garage area was crawling with reporters like Dustin. There was a time when NASCAR was the best reported sport in the world, bar none, and racing was a cauldron of unrest, suspicion and dirty secrets. Most of it got reported.

Now, in the age of information, NASCAR wants more control. When it loses control is when things start to get interesting. That's what happened this week when Long began blogging about a round-table discussion he had recently with three of the best loudmouths we still have in racing -- Larry McReynolds, Kyle Petty and Jimmy Spencer.

In a Q&A, of which a portion of the discussion is on the back of this section, the three discuss the current state of racing affairs very frankly.

"This sport is in serious trouble," is how one of the segments began, and from there the forum got interesting. Over the course of five days, Long released other parts of the discussion, which included subjects such as the Car of Tomorrow and how close the sport is to something cataclysmic like the IRL-CART split.

Almost immediately, on its own Web site, NASCAR responded.

He could've just let it ride, but Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communication fired back, calling the threesome "TV personalities" stirring up controversy.

That would be one way to describe the son of Richard Petty, Mr. Excitement and Larry Mac, but it would also be wrong. They're pretty much part of the fabric of the sport, no matter how you measure it, and what they say resonates. Long is the president of the National Motorsports Press Association, not some blogger in his parents' basement.

Poston said NASCAR would take no action, but hinted that the threesome's television employers (SPEED channel and Fox) should.

NASCAR tried for years to reign in reporters who were just as likely to be fishing buddies with the drivers and crew chiefs on weekdays and intrepid reporters on Sunday, thus NASCAR never got a break.

Over the years, the family business remained closed to outside influence, brought its drivers more in line with the company and homogenized racing to its current state.

That's pretty much what Kyle and Jimmy and Larry Mac were talking about.

This strayed from the script, and that's why NASCAR responded and why it responded the way it did and why it was so interesting to read about. An unspoken truth among us old racing writers was we never pulled for any one driver but for the outcome that inflicted the most pain on the largest amount of people and NASCAR. That was only partly true, but it sounded good.

What started as a simple 30-minute talk among the few remaining people around NASCAR with anything interesting to say stretched into a five-day Internet news cycle and briefly stirred things up here. That's actually good for racing. There was a time when NASCAR understood that, but that was a long time ago.