Only thing missing from the SpongeBob SquarePants 400? A giant sponge

KANSAS CITY, Kan. -- Martin Truex Jr. led for roughly an hour and change, give or take a raindrop. Kevin Harvick led for 40 minutes.

Mother Nature led for 136.

"Cars were really edgy to drive," Harvick said after finishing second at the wet, wild SpongeBob SquarePants 400 at Kansas Speedway. "I'm glad to get Sunday off this week to rest up, because my shoulders are wore out from driving loose all night."

Wouldn't ya know it? The thing the SpongeBob SquarePants 400 missed most was a blasted sponge. A rain delay of two hours, 16 minutes and 39 seconds pushed the race from early Saturday evening and extended the beast all the way into Sunday morning. Track officials said it was the first significant weather delay at Kansas Speedway since October 2004.

Happy Mother's Day, everybody!

"Finishing it on Mother's Day," Jimmie Johnson said after grabbing his third career win in KCK and his first since October 2011, "is very sweet."

Speak for yourself, cowboy. Because the changing, mercurial weather tended to make most of the field cautious, if not outright tense, early on:

So, yeah, strange night --€” sorry, morning --€” all told. Ten different leaders. Sixteen lead changes. Rain Friday. Rain Saturday. The game plans that didn't go out the window wound up soaked.

Joey Logano, the pole-sitter and winner here last fall, wound up being slapped with a penalty not once, but twice. Paul Menard got hit with an uncontrolled tire penalty with 12 laps to go. Which was a misdemeanor compared to Jeb Burton, who was cited for nine different pit-row infractions.

At one restart, the action appeared to go five wide, extending all the way onto the apron. And yet there were just three cautions over 20 laps before Lap 97's unfortunate soaking. After the rain, we were treated to a throwback to 2013's skid-fest: six delays for 29 laps.

"I saw some really nervous race cars," Johnson noted.

Nervous fans, too. Skies got iffy three hours before the green flag, shifting to scary two hours before the drop.

By Lap 73, a soup turned downright surly ...

At Lap 98, with the race already under caution, the expected rain finally hit ...

... Cartoon characters mingled with the press corps ...

... And we waited.

And waited.

More game plans. More windows.

"Yeah, you know, the groove (on the asphalt) definitely spread out," Harvick said. "The hard part about that is, when it does become the final groove, it'll be really hard to pass."

And once the clouds passed, the free-for-all was officially on. Even with a fleet working to dry the track, consequences (and car casualties) thereafter were probably inevitable. Rookie Erik Jones lost control all by his lonesome, throwing a wrench into an otherwise strong evening, on Lap 197. Denny Hamlin hit a wall on Lap 209, then groused about the timing of NASCAR's cautions.

But the sublime truly met the ridiculous on Lap 120, when David Ragan's 55 SpongeBob SquarePants Toyota went careening all the way off the track on Turn 4, straight onto the infield, skidding until it came to rest ... right in the middle of a SpongeBob SquarePants 400 logo:

A moment of potential catastrophe somehow turned into a snapshot of perfect corporate and branding synergy. The evening deserved no less.

You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter at @SeanKeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com.