Whatever the talk will be coming out of Sunday’s Bad Boy Off Road 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, NASCAR greatly increased the chances the conversation will revolve around racing.

That seems like an obvious conclusion — it’s the second race of the Chase for the Sprint Cup playoff, after all — but it certainly wasn’t the case this week following the playoff opener.

The results from Chicagoland Speedway were practically an afterthought when two cars failed post-race inspection — including the race winner — and faced what seemed to be maddeningly uneven penalties until NASCAR made a surprise announcement Wednesday.

Instead of penalizing Martin Truex Jr., the victor at Chicagoland, and Jimmie Johnson, who finished 12th, NASCAR completely changed the penalty system it had announced just one week earlier. Erasing that part of the rule book drew the ire of fans who were already tired of hearing about the last change before the ink had dried, but it was absolutely the right call.

If NASCAR stubbornly stood firm and let the rules play out for the rest of the Chase, there would have been many more weeks where penalties were the hot topic. Now they likely won’t be, because officials simply eliminated the penalties for minor post-race inspection infractions, and the teams should be smart enough not to go past the line for the major foul.

The decision is worthy of kudos, but it’s not even the best thing NASCAR did this week. What’s especially noteworthy is how officials owned up to their error.

Officials essentially recognized their system was unfair because they didn’t see all the possible scenarios. A points penalty to the race winner was meaningless because a winner gets a bye into the next round, but that wouldn’t be the case for any of the other Chase drivers. In this instance, Johnson would have dropped from his current eighth-place ranking in the Chase with the penalty, and thus suffered more than Truex for the exact same infraction.

An argument could have been made they should have seen that coming, but that’s easier to say in hindsight.

Once faced with that fact in real time, NASCAR could have gone into denial, buried its head in the sand or just ignored the valid arguments being made about the injustice of the inspection penalties. And if you don’t follow NASCAR, that’s probably how iron-fisted officials might have addressed it throughout much of NASCAR’s history.

Instead, this was the reaction from Scott Miller, NASCAR’s first-year senior vice president of competition: “This one is on us. We missed that. It’s something that’s not fair, it’s hard to understand and we’re doing our best to rectify that.”

How refreshing. It was interesting to note the social media reaction afterward, because — although there were still some unhappy fans — the admission of error seemed to take a lot of air out of the NASCAR Fan Anger Balloon.

You know the balloon. It’s the one fans inflate over practically every decision NASCAR makes, huffing and puffing until they’re red in the face. But they are often ignored — or at least they feel that way — which only gets them more fired up.

How can NASCAR not see what we see?

This time, officials put their hands up and basically said, “Oops. Our bad!” Then they fixed it right away.

It’s much harder to get mad when someone recognizes the problem and then comes up with a solution.

Of course, this won’t be the last NASCAR controversy of the Chase. It might not even be the last one of the month. There always seems to be some problem for NASCAR to address.

But by showing the kind of flexibility they did this week, officials have shown they have the right mentality to address a difficult situation the next time one comes their way.

Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck