NASCAR fined Las Vegas winner Carl Edwards 100 points, his Roush Fenway Racing team $100,000 and suspended his crew chief Bob Osbourne for six races for having lost the oil tank cover during last week’s race. In other words, NASCAR decided the team was outside the rules, which require the lid to be bolted on to prevent teams from reducing air pressure underneath cars. That adds considerable downforce without any penalty in drag.

Current Toyota executive Lee White, a former Roush employee, pointed out that during his tenure the Roush team had tested in the wind tunnel the gains found by taking the lid off the box holding the oil reserve tank, located behind the driver’s seat. Numerous veterans in the garage confirmed the tactic had been used in various ways over the years by a variety of teams. The object, of course, is to loosen the lid enough to let air pressure out, directed from underneath the car, without the lid becoming entirely disengaged, a telltale for officials.

With the advent of the Car of Today, officials at NASCAR mandated the lid had to be bolted into place. The bolt failed, said team owner Jack Roush, and White, he added, was an “ankle-biting Chihuahua” as far as he and his team were concerned.

OK. So it’s not McLaren vs. Ferrari over stolen F1 car design documents. But it wound up the rivalry between Toyota and Ford’s chief car owner, whose bitterness toward the Japanese manufacturer knows no boundaries.

On top of that, Roush said at various points the facts were not necessarily important to NASCAR officials. “If NASCAR decides your car is out of spec and they decide it gives you an advantage, regardless of whether it’s intentional or not, you’re going to get penalized.”

The dislike between these two sides runs deep, as well.

So fans got a chance to see teams with an axe to grind come Sunday. Who led the most laps? Toyota’s Kyle Busch wracked up the most at the beginning, Roush’s Edwards, who pled innocent to the oil tank incident in Vegas, took a dominant lead near the end before blue oil smoke began pouring from the back of his car as Toyota executives surely cried crocodile tears. That put Busch’s Toyota back into the lead with teammate Tony Stewart right behind him.

“I think we showed them we had a fast race car,” said Edwards after his engine failure put him into the garage following 33 laps in the lead. “They’re going to have to deal with us every week.” It was unclear if “they” meant Toyota or the entire field.

Meanwhile, a question or two was begged. Did Edwards’ engine expire due to pushing his car to the front with more drag than the previous week — now that his oil tank lid was bolted into place? Was there a change to the dry-sump and the cooling of oil due to some re-arrangement of the oil reservoir system?

If that wasn’t enough to ponder, Dale Earnhardt Jr., the driver who replaced Busch the Younger at Hendrick Motorsports, was running second. Chevy as well as Hendrick thus looked to Little E to hold up its honor versus Toyota. The latter, of course, paid Joe Gibbs Racing a reported $25 million to drop GM in favor of the Japanese company. That left plenty of money to hire Busch once he was dropped at Hendrick to make room for Earnhardt.

In the end, Earnhardt Jr. didn’t have enough for the Toyotas and finished third, saying his mid-race chassis adjustments went sour. For his part, while leading 173 laps winner Busch kicked fenders, tires, rear wings, butts, front splitters, Chevy’s, Fords, Dodges and teammate Stewart to take Toyota’s first Sprint Cup victory after 201 collective starts since last season.

They’re calling Busch “Rowdy” these days, a nickname last seen in the movie “Days of Thunder.” Well, he did ride Dale Jarrett’s bumper on the backstraight on the last lap when leading by 2.5 seconds while calling out on the radio, “Coming to the checkers.”

Over-all, he led 365 laps in the Truck, Nationwide and Sprint Cup races. He passed several cars on the apron and wrecked at least one rookie en route to victory in the Truck race. He ran so hard he blew a right front tire in the Nationwide race while pushing a whopping four-second lead. That none-too-gentle kiss with the wall hardly slowed him on Sunday, where Busch became the youngest Sprint Cup series winner on one of NASCAR’s most daunting tracks — after he brushed the wall in Turn 1 again hard enough to bend the rear frame.

On a day when the griping about Goodyear’s hard tires reached epic proportions, I asked Stewart if his teammate was faster because he was more willing to throw caution to the wind and drive it sideways. “He will drive a car far beyond what it’s capable of,” said Stewart, after the usual jokes that Busch has yet to hit the wall really hard.

It’s difficult to believe from the present perspective that as the younger brother of Kurt Busch, Kyle once was known as “Shrub.” He’s now blossomed into one of the weekly go-to guys when it comes to victory lane following the “trade” with Hendrick Motorsports. That now looks like a win-win deal for both teams and drivers involved — not to mention NASCAR in general. It even has the makings of a friendly rivalry between these two drivers as opposed to the scorched earth tactics of the upper crust.

All in a day at the races.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jonathan@jingrambooks.com.