CONCORD, N.C. -- Well, the good news is, the Coca-Cola 600 is going to a true Memorial Day running. Just this once.

After an early Sunday evening of pretty blatant lollygagging under intermittent showers, NASCAR decided not to even try to start the thing until noon ET on Monday.

You could tell, early on, that they had little to no hope.

Funny. You hang around these rain delays and rainouts for enough decades, you learn to sense NASCAR's biorhythms -- whether they're going to try to run, or are just going through the motions before they call it.

It started raining here at 6:06 p.m. ET Sunday evening, and by 6:30 I sensed a whole lot of going through the motions, even after it stopped raining. They knew what the radar looked like.

There just was no spring in anybody's step along the pit road, no sense of urgency anywhere at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

One high official told me before 7 p.m. that they'd be very unlikely to attempt a start if there was any rain after 8 p.m. -- it was sprinkling again at that hour -- because it would put them at a 11 p.m. start, and they weren't going to do that.

Darn. I've always liked to see these night races go late, just to see how absurd they can get.

In 1997, the North Carolina Highway Patrol had to step in after midnight and call off the 600, lest the outbound traffic get mingled with Charlotte's snarling regular morning traffic.

At 12:20 a.m., only 265 of the full 400 laps had been completed. So NASCAR announced that at 12:45, they'd give the field the 20-to-go signal, and let 'em scramble for it.

Jeff Gordon won it, got to the winner's interview around 2 a.m. and then, everybody's night's sleep shot anyway, hung out and talked with us until nearly 3.

That 1 a.m. finish was the record folly for night racing for TV's sake, running into the rainstorm hours, until the July race at Daytona in 2005.

That was a masterpiece. The thing ended around 2 a.m. And this was a race that, when founded as the Firecracker 400 by Big Bill France, originally started at 10 a.m. specifically to avoid the afternoon and evening thunderstorms of summertime Florida.

Tony Stewart won the '05 Pepsi 400 six hours after the scheduled start -- and 16 hours after the time Big Bill knew the race should start.

Maybe it's my decades of covering 24-hour races that make me take these NASCAR situations far less seriously than my U.S.-bound colleagues in the media do. Wee hours spent at racetracks long ago became mundane to me.

I think it was in 1995 at Le Mans when it rained for about 23 of the hours -- although, to their credit, sports car endurance races run right on through the rain. Which goes a long way toward helping you stay awake.

But there was just no fun to be had Sunday evening here. Give NASCAR credit for wising up since '05 at Daytona, off the '97 blunder of the marathon race here.

Now, NASCAR's policy is never to start what it knows it can't finish. And the radar in the Charlotte area showed just too many little cells, moving and combining.

Lowe's officials' handling of the announcement to the fans was a throwback to the dirt track days. It was, in itself, fascinating to hear.

They got the golden-voiced Ken Squier, CBS's longtime Shakespearian soliloquy deliverer of NASCAR, to lament the "dark, rainy night" and introduce track president Marcus Smith, who began by telling the fans, "Y'all are so fantastic …"

The fans booed anyway.

But they went away orderly.

Because NASCAR had done the right thing this time.