JENSEN: An Agenda For Change

Sprint Cup

JENSEN: An Agenda For Change

Despite a lot of great racing, the Chase format still has detractors...

Tom Jensen | Posted January 10, 2011 Charlotte, NC

SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)

Last year saw one of the best three-way finishes to the Chase to the Sprint Cup since the format was adopted in 2004. Still, judging by the e-mails, PMs and Twitter messages I get, a lot of NASCAR fans do not like the Chase format.

Maybe it’s just because Jimmie Johnson has won five consecutive championships and they believe there’s some kind of secret trick to Chase racing that Johnson and Chad Knaus have figured out and that nobody else has.

Or maybe it’s that there was no Chase for the first 56 years of what’s now known as the Sprint Cup Series and everyone got along just fine without it. For decades, when asked about the championship format, the party line was, “NASCAR is different than other sports. Our champion is determined by consistent excellence over a long period of time.”

To see that change means one of two things: 1. It was never true in the first place. Or, 2. The rules and traditions that worked for more than half a century aren’t true any more. In either case, I can see why fans are ticked off.

But I believe there’s another even more basic reason for the anti-Chase sentiment: It’s socialist. Yes, you read that correctly. Socialist. It reeks of wealth redistribution.

After the 25th race of 2010, Kevin Harvick led Jeff Gordon by 219 points, Kyle Busch by 260 and Tony Stewart by 283. Denny Hamlin was 10th, 438 points — basically three full races — behind Harvick.

A week later, the points were reset after Richmond and — Poof! — just like that, Hamlin was in the lead, Johnson was second with a 10-point deficit and Harvick was third 30 points back. That, dear friends, is totally socialist. And NASCAR fans don’t like socialism one bit.

Worse yet, it’s the wrong kind of socialism.

All the Chase does is redistribute points among the top teams, which have assets and resources the smaller teams can’t even dream about. Since 1990, Hendrick Motorsports, Richard Childress Racing, Joe Gibbs Racing and Roush Fenway Racing have won 19 of 21 Sprint Cup championships. The two other winners aren’t even in the sport anymore, Alan Kulwicki dying in an airplane crash in 1993 and Dale Jarrett long retired, with Robert Yates Racing shut down.

And as the system exists now, no other team has a snowball’s chance in hell of wresting the title from one of the top four teams, with the possible exception of Stewart-Haas Racing, which is basically a Hendrick satellite team.

You want to redistribute the wealth? You want to give guys would otherwise have no shot at winning a title get in the mix? Here are some radical ways to inject some fan interest in the Chase.

1. CAP IT — No team gets more than two cars into the Chase under any circumstances. Make teammates race each other during NASCAR’s regular season instead of having the luxury of using much of it as a test session.

If Hendrick Motorsports hits on the hot setup, they still don’t get more than two cars in the Chase. Period. This would have the bonus of making the long regular season more compelling, too.

2. BRAND EQUITY — Each manufacturer gets three slots in the Chase. The top three Chevrolets make it in, the top three Fords, etc. This would have the real effect of teams actually having to strategize about what brand of car to race. Obviously, a team that ran Dodges would have much better odds of make the Chase than a team that ran Chevrolets, since there’s only one full-time Dodge teams now.

More to the point, manufacturer rivalry has always been a key element of NASCAR fan participation, and one that was diminished substantially when the generic car of tomorrow was introduced in 2007.

3. MAKE IT COUNT — NASCAR desperately needs to reward race winners more than it does now. To have a system where one driver wins both the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400, plus is victorious at Charlotte and has a bunch of top fives, but doesn’t make the Chase is ludicrous. But that’s what Jamie McMurray did in 2010.

The late David Poole used to advocate giving a driver 500 bonus points for winning his first race of the season. That’s a little extreme, but it’s clear that winning a race deserves much more than a 15-point bump over finishing second.

4. A MODEST PROPOSAL — And here, dear friends, is the most radical idea of all: Each team that completes the entire schedule (excluding start-and-park cars) gets one and one only spot in the Chase. That includes the big boys, too — only one car each from Hendrick, RCR, Roush and JGR. By my count, last year that would have meant 13 or 14 teams would have each made the Chase.

More importantly, it means that owners not in the top four would see the value of their teams shoot up exponentially. How much would it be worth to Richard Petty or Chip Ganassi or Michael Waltrip to be able to approach a sponsor and say they have a guaranteed spot in the Chase? From a practical standpoint, it would create tremendous additional value for the teams without NASCAR having to use the dreaded F-word: franchising.

For that matter, if the start-and-park guys knew they could make the Chase by running the whole race distance, guess what? They’d run the whole race distance, or at least some of them would.

Crazy, you say? Absurd? Maybe?

But if you believe in leveling the playing field and opening up the Chase, than really level it and really open it up. It’s not time to tweak the Chase, it’s time to take bold and dramatic steps to reignite fan interest. The racing’s already great; now it’s time to get people excited about it all over again.

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

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Tom Jensen

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