Chris Buescher's crew chief meets with NASCAR officials after photo finish with Kyle Larson, accepts race outcome

And there was grounds for potential controversy, to be sure.

Photo finish aside, Chris Buescher’s RFK Racing team tweeted a photo of the start-finish line following the race, appearing to illustrate that it was painted unevenly. That would obviously make calling a winner in a super-close scenario quite complicated.

But with Graves’ admission to NASCAR, the fuss should die down relatively quickly.

“I mean they showed us the picture they create using the lasers,” Graves said. “We were just wondering if they were using the painted line or not. They don’t, it’s actually they have a photosystem that is a lot more accurate than that.”

Even as he struggled to come to terms with what had happened Buescher himself handled things pretty gracefully in a post-race interview.

“I don’t know what to say right now,” Buescher said on the FOX broadcast. “I haven’t seen the replay other than just a picture. I sure can’t see it in that picture. That just sucks to be that close.

“It was a great finish for us, a really strong day. A lot of speed in this CASTROL Edge Ford Mustang. We really needed that. Needed a win more. I thought we might have had that one. Had a lot of speed there, firing off we were really good. And really all day. Really proud of that and had some good strategy to get us back up there. Tried to cover what I could and gave him half a lane too much, I suppose. But good, hard race right there down to the line. Yeah, just that hurts.”

All in all, it was a terrific weekend for NASCAR, which saw one of its unquestioned stars triumph in the most unlikely of manners, with a historic finish.

Buescher just happened to be on the wrong end of history.

“It’s one of those you go through huge emotion of we thought we won, you celebrate and then it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, no you didn’t win,'” Graves said. “That makes it hard for sure.”