After Much Muddle in Middle, Irvan Leaves No Doubt at End : Auto racing: He shows skeptics by winning. Earnhardt and Allison crash on the 198th lap.

In one of the most confusing and perplexing races ever run at Daytona International Speedway, Ernie Irvan of Modesto claimed victory in the 33rd annual Daytona 500 Sunday before an estimated 145,000.

Irvan, winner of only one Winston Cup race since he moved to North Carolina from California in 1984, was an unlikely winner in his Chevrolet Lumina, but it was no fluke. Five laps from the finish, Irvan powered his car around the black Chevrolet of Dale Earnhardt to wrest the lead from racing’s most intimidating driver.

Two laps later, as Earnhardt and Davey Allison battled side by side for the right to challenge Irvan, their cars tangled and ended up spinning along the back straightaway. This brought out the ninth caution flag of the race and allowed Irvan the luxury of cruising home behind the pace car to a $233,000 payoff. His average speed was a slow 148.148 m.p.h.

“It’s better to be unexpected and win than be expected to win and lose,” Irvan said, philosophically, after acknowledging he felt strange running down his idol, Earnhardt, to win stock car racing’s biggest prize.

“Earnhardt has been an inspiration to me. I’ve come up with sort of the same reputation he has--a rough, tough competitor who isn’t afraid of knocking cars around. I’m sorry he and Davey tangled because I would liked to have raced him to the line. I think we would have won because his car just wasn’t handling as well as ours was.”

The victory should not have been too unexpected, because Irvan, 32, was the second fastest qualifier for the race.

Sterling Marlin finished second and Joe Ruttman, a veteran from Upland, Calif., who was making a comeback after being out of NASCAR racing since 1986, was third.

It was the second consecutive year a West Coast driver won. Last year it was Derrike Cope, of Spanaway, Wash., who inherited the lead from Earnhardt on the last lap when a cut tire slowed Earnhardt.

Sunday’s confusion stemmed from a new NASCAR rule that forbids changing tires during a yellow caution flag period--a rule designed to assure safer working conditions along pit row. The rule worked as far as the pits were concerned, because there was no congestion. But it also spread the cars apart around the track so that it was nearly impossible to figure out who was racing for the lead.

“Once you get out of sync (on pit stops), you don’t know where you’re at,” said seven-time winner Richard Petty, who finished 19th but who was running with the leaders until his Pontiac began swerving down the backstretch 15 laps from the finish. “All you can do is go out and run as hard as you can. It might have been all right in the pits, but it sure wasn’t on the race track.”

Twenty cars were involved in accidents and there were no injuries. Most of the accidents involved cars spinning out as teams chose to run worn tires rather than pit.

Earnhardt, the defending Winston Cup champion, said: “I don’t like the tire rule. Not changing tires under caution makes it hard on the drivers to drive the cars harder. They have to drive them with a lot of push, or they have to drive them too loose. Either way, it puts you on the ragged edge. There’s a lot of torn-up cars out there, and I think a lot of that can be blamed on the pit-road rules.”

As expected, Earnhardt took off from the start and led 40 of the first 65 laps, continuing a week of domination that had seen him win the Busch Clash, one of the Twin 125 qualifying races and the Goody’s 300 Grand National event. On lap seven, his speed of 194.217 m.p.h. was the fastest of the race.

He and the Richard Childress crew elected to stick with his original tires until the 110th lap, more than halfway through the race. By that time, he had dropped out of the top 10 because he had been hit with a stop-and-go penalty for driving over the blend line coming out the pits on an earlier stop for fuel. With worn tires he couldn’t catch up.

For the next 175 miles, each time a race leader pitted, he not only lost the lead, he dropped off the top-10 leaderboard.

The race resumed a sense of order after Richard Petty spun on lap 184 and took Robby Gordon with him. The caution flag bunched the leaders for a sprint to the finish.

There were 13 laps remaining when the green flag came out with Rusty Wallace, Darrell Waltrip, Earnhardt, Irvan, Kyle Petty, Rick Mast and Ruttman in line.

Earnhardt, as expected, bolted to the front on the restart. Wallace got caught in a three-car-wide scramble in the fourth turn and slid down across the track, taking four other cars with him, including Waltrip, who thought he was about to sneak away with the victory.

“Nobody could have run me down,” an anguished Waltrip said. “It just got too tight in the turn and somebody (Kyle Petty) tapped Wallace and cars started going every which way.”

Larry McClure, owner of Irvan’s winning car, agreed.

“I think Darrell would have probably won the race on gas mileage if the race had stayed on the green,” McClure said. “We were confused all day with the pit rules, but everyone else was, too. We just had Ernie drive flat out all day long and hope for the best.”

It took four laps to haul away the wreckage and clean up the debris. That left Earnhardt in front with seven laps remaining, and few didn’t expect to see the black Chevy pull away.

Irvan was among the few.

He pulled his yellow and red Chevy up behind Earnhardt’s car and, after getting a draft off the fourth turn and through the tri-oval, he pulled out and shot past Earnhardt on lap 194. Before he could regroup and chase Irvan, Earnhardt was challenged on the high side by Allison. As the two of them careened around track side-by-side, it enabled Irvan to widen his lead.

Had either backed off, the other might have caught Irvan, but by running together they created turbulence that held both back.

On the 198th lap, the struggle ended when Earnhardt and Allison spun together on the back straightaway. Allison slid into a dirt levee protecting the infield lake, but Earnhardt managed to struggle around and finished fifth, the same as last year.

“All week long, I kept telling folks that we could do it,” Irvan said. “I don’t think anyone believed me, but maybe they will now.”

Irvan raced on tracks in Stockton, Bakersfield, El Cajon and Riverside--among others in California--for nine years before coming South to look for a Winston Cup ride.

Hi only previous victory came last August in the Busch 500, a short track in Bristol, Tenn. His father, Vic, won a Winston West race at Ascot Park in 1978.