Here's one of the seldom-mentioned recurring themes of NASCAR tracks. My friend Rick Minter and have joked about this repeatedly over the years.

You get a soft drink out of the drink cooler. It doesn't taste quite right. Your first thought is that you're coming down with something. Hmm. Then you pick up the can, and look on the bottom, and discover that the expiration date was about, oh, six months ago.

Yes. They just kept the drinks that were left over from the last race and put them in the drink case.

The first time this happened, it was Diet Dr. Pepper at Richmond. Then it was Diet Coke in Kansas. I went to the garage area for about an hour this morning, and when I returned, there was an upside-down Diet Coke next to my laptop. I thought I'd just left it there and let it get warm, so I took it back, stuck it in the back and got another one. That's when I found the can had been left by Minter, who couldn't wait for me to notice. I took a swig of the Diet Coke I'd gotten to replace the first one. It didn't taste quite right. I looked on the bottom of the can. The expiration date was November 2009.

So I walked up to the reception desk and ruined the day for some of the volunteers working there. I didn't get upset. I just pointed out that all the drinks had expired.

"We just picked those up last week," one said. "Didn't we?"

Another said, "Yeah, those are brand-new."

"Well, you may have picked them up last week, but the bottom of the cans says you should have picked them up sometime early last fall."

Shortly afterwards, a line of Atlanta Motor Speedway employees marched into the press room carrying 12 packs of Coke and Diet Coke.

In Kansas, when this happened, I remember a track official getting quite upset.

"It's not like you had to pay for them," he said.

"That's true," said I. "But I still don't want to get sick from drinking something, whether it's free or not."

It undermines the fresh and tasty goodness of Diet Coke when its ingredients are, uh, "wearing out" or "dissipating" or "undergoing chemically induced withering," or whatever it is that happens.