We’re now well into Chase Number Five in the history of NASCAR’s top level racing tour, and Jimmie Johnson appears a lock to win a third-straight title, a fact the first star to do so, Cale Yarborough, has expressed resignation at seeing. Certainly when Dale Earnhardt won a seventh title, it had an effect on view of the first achievement of seven NASCAR titles by Richard Petty, and seeing Johnson potentially match Cale’s feat likewise puts perspective into what Cale accomplished three decades ago – in a supreme irony, Johnson’s first two titles came exactly 30 years after Cale’s first two titles and if he pulls off the third, it will also be on Cale’s 30th anniversary.
But with the Chase has come yet another anticlimatic final ten weeks of the season, with the point race that was supposed to be dramatic instead fizzling out almost as soon as it starts. It’s been that way from the very first Chase when Kurt Busch won at New Hampshire in 2004 and thus took a command of the Chase he had no serious chance of relinquishing; the eight-point margin of victory for Busch was insultingly meaningless, as Busch was never threatened with actually losing that year’s title, and the periodically-cited statement that five drivers were mathematically in contention entering that last race is likewise insultingly meaningless, as only a total collapse by Busch could have changed the point lead.
The fact of the anticlimatic nature of the Chase has brought forth renewed commentary about changes to the Chase format to “spice it up.” The latest such epistile, from the good racing folks at AP, is a rehash of an idea that has floated around for a while – a seperate scoring system for Chase drivers with a 12-1 drop in points per Chase driver finishing position. The argument advanced for such a system is that it would keep all twelve Chase drivers in mathematical contention virtually down to the wire.
But therein lay the fundamental weakness of both the seperate scoring idea and the concept of the Chase itself. Scoring Chasers seperately means there is no reason for them to race anyone over the final ten weeks. As it is now the Chasers are involved in the least competitive NASCAR period in decades, with almost no resistance to them offered in the final ten races outside of Talladega and only four teams commanding all twelve Chase spots and the one hope of a first-time winner in 2008 (as well as of a different team finally taking a win) being penalized out of the top-15 at Talladega by a yellow-line rule the sanctioning body has no business policing to begin with.
Scoring Chasers seperately points to the fundamental weakness of the Chase format – the segregation of twelve drivers from the rest of the competition. Regardless of point format, the Chasers, by being segregated out of the rest of the field by point-scoring fiat, are undeservedly taken to a different level in the sport where they have to prove nothing beyond finishing decently and finishing ahead of each other.
What the sport has wound up with is the worst of all worlds – the races are less competitive now than they’ve been in decades; the Chasers have no incentive to win races; yet Chasers win virtually every race anyway; there are no first-time or comeback winners, especially in terms of race teams amid a surge of rumored merger deals, a surge that threatens to shrink the sport’s team-owner pool and thus an important competition level even more than it has shrunk this decade.
The Chase was put in place because of Matt Kenseth’s one-win championship season of 2003. The answer to such a situation, though, lay in the driver who outperformed everyone in 2003 – Ryan Newman. The answer lay in simply adding so many points for winning races and leading most laps as to make a title impossible without doing both. Yet as has been the wont of NASCAR in the Brian France era, simple solutions staring the sanctioning body in the face have been ruthlessly ignored in favor of convoluted and unworkable alternatives such as the Chase format.
With ratings still declining and the sport facing a Rubicon of unworkable costs and declining interest, fiddling with the Chase format via seperate scoring systems won’t solve anything. As far as the points system goes, only a complete reappraisal of the Chase concept and replacement with a performance-oriented points system will help the sport get back its competitive soul.