There are certain places in Winston Cup racing where the unpredictable is oftentimes inevitable.

For example, Talladega Superspeedway is known for "the big one," usually spectacular, multi-car crashes that result from NASCAR's insistence upon retaining restrictor plates on stock cars at superspeedways.

Darlington Raceway is known for its reputation as "the track too tough to tame."

Texas Motor Speedway has quickly become known as the fastest track on the circuit.

And then there's Atlanta Motor Speedway, site of Sunday's Bass Pro Shops MBNA 500. While most drivers eagerly anticipate their two visits each year to the 1.54-mile D-shaped oval, the track has developed a reputation as the host of some very strange occurrences.

It's not surprising that some drivers who've had a great deal of success there, folks like Bill Elliott (five career wins), Rusty Wallace (three wins), Bobby Labonte and Dale Jarrett (two wins each) think of it as "Hotlanta," while others who have had struggles or unexplainable mishaps there, such as Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Elliott (he has an obvious love/hate relationship with the place), think of it as "Notlanta."

"If it's going to happen, it's going to happen at Atlanta," Earnhardt is fond of saying.

He should know. For as lucky as Junior has been at places like Talladega, he's also been the most visible victim of Atlanta's quirks and penchant for the odd and bizarre.

"We always run great at Atlanta, we lead a lot, but it's kind of like Martinsville: we are one of the cars to beat, but something always seems to happen late in the race to knock us out of the win," he said. "A cut tire when we were set to win late in the spring race in 2001… a piece of metal in my eye later that season… even a brake line cut by a television telemetry sensor while we were leading in 2000."

	“	I was racing online the other night on the Atlanta track; I led the entire race until the end, and then the car started pushing and I dropped back and finished fourth. I laughed and thought, 'Well, that's about usual.' ”
		— Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Why, Earnhardt can't seem to win for losing, even away from the racetrack.

"I was racing online (on the Internet against competitors from across the globe) the other night on the Atlanta track," he said. "I led the entire race until the end, and then the car started pushing and I dropped back and finished fourth. I laughed and thought, 'Well, that's about usual.'"

Yet Earnhardt Jr. believes he can still conquer AMS and finally put his streak of bad luck in the past, once and for all.

"Maybe I got all of that out of my system racing on the computer and we can pull it off Sunday," said Earnhardt Jr., who has been knocking on the door of late; in his last five races at the central Georgia racetrack, Junior put together a streak of three straight top-five finishes.

Elliott is another victim of Atlanta's fickleness. In the fall of 1988, he won his first and only Winston Cup championship there. Fast-forward to 1992, and Elliott won the race, yet still managed to lose the championship to Alan Kulwicki, who claimed the title by a meager 10 points, the closest deciding measure in Winston Cup history. Elliott lost the championship in perhaps one of the worst ways imaginable: he won the race, but Kulwicki earned the 10 bonus points for leading the most laps in that particular race, one more than Elliott had.

It's a misfortune that Elliott still laments to this day, call it perhaps his toughest defeat ever, and certainly the worst race win he ever has earned in his career.

"When we went into the race at that time it was like we were kind of a long shot," Elliott said. "We still mathematically had a good shot at it, but yet we really didn't have anything to lose. Davey (the late Davey Allison) had it to lose; we had it to win. We did everything right that day. We went in, led the race, obviously lacked a little bit of leading all the race, but yet had a good run. Kulwicki had a good run and it ended up we won the race; he won the championship. We did everything we could do. He did everything he needed to do."

Atlanta has also been the site of a number of significant accomplishments -- both good and bad -- in the careers of several of today's top drivers. It's where: