No sport offers up a more bewildering array of souvenir crap memorabilia than NASCAR, and They Make It digs deep into the corners of the Internet to bring all that strangeness to light. Today: toys!

The item: The Tony Stewart/Office Depot car construction set, $12.99 from K'Nex.

The deal: Now, there are tons of NASCAR toys and such out there, but you know what makes this one for me? It's the stubble on the face of the little Tony figure there. Nothin' like letting the kids model themselves after NASCAR's ultimate what-the-hell-did-I-do-last-night driver, huh?

K'Nex also has cars for Jeff Gordon's pit crew and Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s garage, a curious choice considering the fact that both of those organizations could, in fact, be accused of being toy departments. Zing! 

The hat tip: Reader Andrea B. found this one for us. Got some bizarre NASCARiana for us to check out? Email me at jay.busbee@yahoo.com with the details. Get to it! 

No flukes here, folks. Our final four drivers in the NASCAR World Cup are four of the best in the Sprint Cup Series. And as a reflection of the current microtrend in the Cup Series, none of those four are Hendrick drivers, though Tony Stewart is in Hendrick equipment.

We've got two Chevrolets in Stewart and Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch's Toyota and Carl Edwards' Ford. Plus, all four drivers have won at Atlanta Motor Speedway, home of this week's semifinals, so this could be one of the most even rounds yet.

The Matchups: Kyle Busch vs. Carl Edwards, Tony Stewart vs. Kevin Harvick

Jay's Picks:

Edwards -- On overall talent, Kyle gets the nod, but in terms of consistency--and strength at Atlanta--I'm giving the nod to Carl. Wish these two knew what was at stake here; I'd love to see 'em turn each other going for the WC finals!

Harvick -- In most years, I'd say Stewart in a landslide, but this year, Harvick is the more consistent driver. This one's going to be a tight battle--both in the top 10, at worst--but in the end, I'm thinking Harvick has the edge, setting up a fine Harvick v. Edwards brawl to settle it all!

Nick's Picks:

Busch -- No, I'm not being contrarian for the sake of it, but I can't pick against Busch right now. How crazy would it be to see him win both races this weekend? Book it. Busch wins the Nationwide race Saturday night and the Cup race on Sunday.

Stewart -- We anointed Group B as our Group of Death before the contest started, and it's only fitting that two of the four drivers are in the semifinals and I think that they'll meet each other at Richmond for the title. If Stewart's leading late in the race, he and crew chief Darian Grubb are going to make the decision to come get tires this time and beat Harvick by a few positions.

As NASCAR rolls into Atlanta for this weekend's Labor Day race, it's worth taking a look back at one of the finest races in the sport's history: the 1992 Hooters 500 at Atlanta.

The scenarios at the season's final race were too rich to even be believed. It was Richard Petty's final race and Jeff Gordon's first. Three drivers -- Davey Allison, Bill Elliott and Alan Kulwicki -- had a chance at winning the season's Cup championship.

So let's pick it up right at the start, with the introduction of the race. Check out how far we've come ... and yet, how familiar it all is:

And the race continued ...

With Allison now out of the hunt, it was down to Elliott and Kulwicki, the legend and the one-man show. And with just a few laps remaining, awareness dawned on everyone watching that maybe, just maybe, we were about to see something spectacular:

This race represented the end of an era in so many ways. Petty was done. Within a few months, Kulwicki would be gone. A few years later, Atlanta reconfigured its track from oval to quad-oval. And Gordon ushered in a new tide of driver, media-savvy, with reach and influence far beyond NASCAR's traditional Southern roots. It's poetic, in a way, how much came together that one afternoon ... and how much would later fall apart.

There's plenty to complain about in NASCAR. And it's always easy to bathe the past in nostalgia, to make yesterday look so much better than today. But this isn't one of those times. The 1992 Atlanta race showed us, without a doubt, why this is one hell of a fine sport.

You want attention for your event/TV show/website? There's only one person to call: Erin Andrews!

The ESPN reporter is guaranteed to draw eyeballs no matter what she's doing, and on Thursday, for the first time, she got rocketed around a NASCAR track -- Atlanta Motor Speedway -- courtesy of fellow ESPN analyst Dale Jarrett.

"I’ve been to probably the biggest events in all of sports – the Super Bowl, both college championships and the World Series – but I have never been to a NASCAR race," she said. (The horror!) And, like everyone who visits a track for the first time, she came away impressed. 

Jarrett, who has a win at Atlanta on his resume, took a newly-firesuited Andrews out on the track for a few laps. ("How fast did we go?" Andrews asked. "170 mph," Jarrett responded. "We went 185," Andrews insisted.) And afterward, Andrews had seen the proverbial light:

"I was telling Dale as soon as he could hear me, this gave me such a different perspective and so much respect for these guys do," she said. "I was just on a track by myself [with Dale] and I was [laughing] like a little kid. I can’t imagine all the other cars being on the track and trying to worry about passing them, maintaining position and winning the thing and don’t hit them or the wall. This was one heck of an experience. I can’t imagine doing it with other drivers on the track and it really opened my eyes. I have always had respect for these people, but now it’s different and this was amazing."

Here's video of America's Sideline Princess doing some high-speed cruising:

All right, AMS: your next challenge is getting Justin Bieber in a car. That'll bring a whole new wave of interest!

The repaving project is well underway at Daytona International Speedway. A few weeks ago, we brought you photos of the initial grinding, and now, we can see some actual asphalt. Those of you familiar with Daytona and its surroundings will recognize that as Turn 3 and 4, with the Volusia Mall in the background.

The project is now in its ninth week. Jeff Burton is scheduled to visit the track next week to bury a time capsule at the start-finish line. Gotta tell you, if I were one of the steamroller drivers pressing the asphalt on that 31-degree bank, this would be the greatest job ever ... until I put a co-worker into the wall, that is.

Racing and environmentalism go together about as well as mashed potatoes and chocolate, or so the conventional wisdom holds. The NASCAR infield and the Green movement have, shall we say, divergent constituencies. But one driver, at least, is doing her best to bring the two sides together.

ARCA driver Leilani Munter, pictured above left with the Atlanta Falcons' Ovie Mughelli and former NFL'er Mike Alstott at the Gulf Coast, is hard at work trying to bring attention to environmentalism. It's a tough road -- NASCAR, with its vehicles driving hundreds of miles in a circle, is the lazy thinker's whipping boy for anti-environmentalism -- but Munter is doing her part to open a few eyes, as a current CNN profile of her efforts reveals.

Still, sponsorship has been difficult to come by. "It used to be that a woman with everything going on that Leilani has going on could get a bunch of sponsors," said ARCA team owner Mark Gibson, who wants to run Munter in several races next season. "But right now, there's a lot of uncertainty with the economy."

Another problem: Munter is, at present, a race-car driver in only the most generous sense of the term. She ran a few laps at Daytona this year before getting caught up in a wreck, and that's been that so far. 

Munter's goal is to raise awareness by putting a message on her hood. But she got a taste of what it will be like when her Daytona sponsor, Native Energy, dealt with consumer criticism for its choice to sponsor a NASCAR ride. Thomas H. Rawls met criticism head-on, writing on the company's blog, "Ultimately ... I asked myself: How does Native Energy reach people who are not already converts on the issue of climate change? Anyone who is engaged in any broad effort to speak to the public faces this question: Do I talk only to friendly audiences, or do I face the doubters and the hostiles?" To his credit, Rawls -- and, of course, Munter -- doesn't simply preach to the choir.

Munter is taking several proactive steps -- she gives 10 to 15 speeches a year at environmental conferences, and purchases an acre of rainforest for each race she runs. She hopes to return to the track in late September in Kansas, but before then, she's got plenty of environmental preaching to do. 

Good for her for bucking the tide; regardless of political affiliation, NASCAR fans have to at least admire someone who doesn't go along to get along. And if nothing else, this ought to show that NASCAR isn't a monolithic conservative bloc. That makes for easy stereotyping, but it's got little relevance to the truth.

Yeah, let's all admit it, NASCAR and the television network BET don't seem like they fit together, much like Jeff Gordon and Wal-Mart.

BET is an untapped audience for NASCAR, so you can't fault the sport's attempt to go get new fans with "Changing Lanes," a reality show competition for 10 drivers in NASCAR's Drive for Diversity started Wednesday at 8PM ET on BET. (If you missed Wednesday's episode, you can set your DVRs for 9AM ET Saturday, September 4 and 1:30AM ET Sunday, September 5.)

From Sporting News:

That competition will play out this fall in Changing Lanes, a documentary series produced by the NASCAR Media Group that will be televised on BET beginning Wednesday. BET has purchased 10 episodes of the one-hour show, which debuts this week.

It’s a cross between MTV’s Real World and NBC’s The Apprentice.

Changing Lanes examines the challenges of making it as a driver, with one of them being eliminated each week until there’s a lone survivor.

So if you're looking for a mid-week NASCAR fix, flip on over to BET to see what this is all about. It's got to be better than "Jersey Shore," right?

Believe it or not, episodes of "Jersey Shore" may be newer than "Changing Lanes." The winner of "Changing Lanes" got a ride with Revolution Racing -- the NASCAR funded team run by Max Siegel for Drive for Diversity -- for January's Toyota All-Star Showdown at Irwindale Speedway.

Yes, that's January 2010, so if you're so inclined, you can go see who earned the seat by simply looking in the box score of a race that's eight months old.

One of the key themes -- true or not -- of the last few years in NASCAR has been the perception that the sport has left its "core fans" in the dust, and quite frankly, this is a blatant grab for new viewers while hoping that those "core fans" will watch a show that was filmed when last year's Halloween candy was still being eaten. (Plus, the show got the 8PM ET timeslot, which is far less prestigious than being an hour or two later on BET's schedule.)

The Drive for Diversity is an admirable program, but for some reason it has always felt like a token attempt to diversify the sport. Maybe that has to do with the relative lack of success (so far) of the program's participants, but don't the 10 participants deserve better than a show that airs nine months after the result is easily available to anyone with a television or an internet connection?

For an up-close look at how the sausage gets made in NASCAR -- specifically, how races get snatched from one track and dispensed to another -- you need go no further than this week's NASCAR.com interview with Bruton Smith, Speedway Motorsports Inc. owner, on how he made the decision to pull a race from Atlanta and give it to Kentucky.

Apparently, literally hours before Smith made his call, he received a visit from Georgia's governor, Sonny Perdue, as well as the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the House. What followed was classic political doublespeak and ultimately failed attempts at horse-trading, retold in vintage Smith fashion.

So why did Smith make the switch? Here's his reply, in its entirety:

"Weather, weather, weather. And I’ve talked with the governor down there [in Georgia] repeatedly. I’ve been down there on two occasions and we asked for some little things, and we really thought we were going to get them. But we didn’t.

"The governor and the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the house [in Georgia], they all flew up to Charlotte and we had a meeting for two hours and 15 minutes. It was a great love fest. I really enjoyed it — plus the governor brought me a necktie. I thought that was great."

Aw, that's precious. A necktie! The hundreds of thousands of people who are going to lose out on the estimated $50 million in income generated by the spring race are oh so very happy you got a new necktie, Bruton. I wouldn't let any of them tie it for you, though. You might find they pull it a little tight. (Full disclosure: I live in Atlanta.)

Anyway, according to Smith, Perdue insisted that the state of Georgia didn't have the funds to carry out on those "little things" -- which Smith refused to identify -- that would have kept the race in Atlanta. When asked whether Smith or the governor called one another's bluff, Smith replied,

"I wouldn’t say it like that. That sounds like a poker game. I don’t think anybody called anybody’s bluff. We had a two hour and 15-minute love fest and he told me how much he loved me. The lieutenant governor and speaker all said how much they loved me and loved the speedway. … I was very clear that I had not made my decision before that meeting. That meeting did not end until 6:15 — and I didn’t make my decision until 6:20."

Five minutes. Five [expletive deleted] minutes. Yes, it sounds very much like Smith deeply and soberly considered what Perdue et. al. had to say ... for five minutes. 

Look, Smith's a businessman, and businesses pick up and move from states all the time. Smith has a right to go where he can find the best audience for his product, and Atlanta fans did themselves no favors by watching too many races from the comfort of their own homes. That's all out there, all in Smith's favor.

But to toy around with the process -- to talk of "love fests" and "little things" and characterize this as just something that, gosh darn it, didn't quite work out, no hard feelin's, y'all -- that's just flat-out disrespectful to the Atlanta fans who have supported racing and Smith for all these years. As he himself noted, Atlanta regularly sold out all 180,000 seats during the decade-plus it hosted the final race of the season.

So this should be a screaming warning to the fans at any other Speedway Motorsports track -- heads up, you could be next. And clearly, a necktie alone isn't enough to sway Smith's mind.

Juan Pablo Montoya will be sponsored by Huggies this weekend at Atlanta, and quite honestly, this may be the most appropriate new sponsor entry into the Sprint Cup Series in a long time. JPM and his wife Connie just welcomed their third child amidst the continuing Sprint Cup baby boom. No word if expectant father Jamie McMurray will get free diapers for being Montoya's teammate.

-- After the separation of John Wes Townley from Richard Childress' Nationwide team, veteran Morgan Shepherd has been driving the No. 21 in the remaining unsponsored races and Childress and Shepherd struck a deal Tuesday that keeps Shepherd in the car for more races this season. It also allows Shepherd to potentially have the owner's points -- a valuable commodity given that the car would be locked into the first five races of 2011 -- next year.

-- In that same link, it's noted that Paul Tracy will be making his return to ovals in the Izod IndyCar Series. Tracy has run some road courses this season and failed to qualify for the Indianapolis 500. He'll be in the No. 24, subbing for the injured Mike Conway who was hurt in that brutal crash in the final moments of the 500.

-- Elliott Sadler told Sirius' Dave Moody that he'd have an announcement on his future plans in two to three weeks. Sadler also said that he was talking to an existing Cup team that was looking to expand. That would be a mighty quick expansion.

-- And in the news that everyone has been waiting for, Kevin Conway is back in the Sprint Cup Series for the rest of the season. Conway, who has locked up the Raybestos Rookie of the Year by virtue of being the only rookie on the circuit, will drive the No. 7 for Robby Gordon Motorsports. And yes, ExtenZe will continue to be his sponsor.

This year's race to the Chase has been a relative snoozer, but given that the Chase itself looks to be incredibly wide-open, isn't that more than a fair trade-off?

Points leader Kevin Harvick and Jeff Gordon have already clinched their spots in the Chase, so if they were so inclined, they could skip Atlanta and Richmond and show up at New Hampshire refreshed and ready to go. And if all goes well for the nine drivers behind them in the standings, they could join Harvick and Gordon relaxing on Lake Norman for the Richmond race, no matter what the rest of the field does.*

Here are the scenarios for those nine drivers, and it's safe to say that Kyle Busch will clinch by Lap 40.

Kyle Busch: Busch needs to finish 40th or better if he doesn't lead a lap, 42nd if he leads one lap, or 43rd if he leads the most laps. Easy.

Carl Edwards: Here's where it gets close. Edwards needs to finish 21st if he doesn't lead a lap, 23rd if he leads one and 25th if he leads the most. Very doable given his Atlanta history.

Denny Hamlin: Hamlin needs to finish 20th with no laps led, 22nd with one lap led, or 23rd with the most of the laps led.

Tony Stewart: A 19th-place finish with no laps led clinches it for Smoke, while 21st with one lap led or 23rd with the most laps led gets the job done, too.

Jeff Burton: Burton needs to finish 17th if he doesn't get to the front, 19th if he leads a single lap, or 21st if he leads the most.

Matt Kenseth: Kenseth needs a top 15 if he doesn't lead a lap, 17th if he leads one, or 19th if he leads the most.

Jimmie Johnson: Vader's got to get a top 10 without a lap led if he wants to clinch at Atlanta, 11th with a lap led, or 13th with the most laps led.

Kurt Busch: Busch's scenario is nice and orderly: 9th if he doesn't lead a lap, 10th with a lap led, and 11th with the most laps led.

Greg Biffle: Biffle's is the most farfetched of any of the possible clinchers, but given the way that he's been running on the bigger tracks lately, it's feasible. Biffle needs to finish 4th with no laps led, 5th with a lap led and 7th with the most laps led.

There's no scenario for Clint Bowyer to clinch by himself at Atlanta, but it's also possible that Bowyer could lock into the field. Bowyer leads 13th place Jamie McMurray by 100 points, and if Bowyer can gain 96 points on McMurray and 95 points on Mark Martin, he's in the 2010 Chase without having to worry at Richmond.

*No, no one will be even thinking of skipping the Richmond race.