Brian France considers new Chase format a success
HOMESTEAD, Fla. – Unsurprisingly, NASCAR chairman Brian France said Friday that he’s happy with the new Chase format in the Sprint Cup Series and that if any changes are going to be made to the Chase for 2015, they will be modest.
“I would say very modest, modest to zero,” France said. “We reserve the right if there’s a modest thing that we might make an adjustment on, but like I said, it’s exceeded what I had hoped for, and it’s done precisely what we thought we wanted to do, which was recalibrate competition, or winning rather, and still have a strong place for consistency and all the rest, but recalibrate that balance. It’s only year one, but clearly we’re on our way.”
NASCAR’s 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup was instituted in 2004. Since its inception, it’s undergone multiple changes including the size of the Chase field and the criteria for qualification. The format has been changed every 2.75 years. If NASCAR wanted to make a change, while it’d look a sudden one, it wouldn’t be entirely out of the norm.
If you’ve been following the Chase closely, you’d likely think any possible changes would involve winning given the extreme marketing push surrounding the importance of winning this season and winless Ryan Newman’s presence among the four drivers eligible to win the title at Homestead on Sunday.
However, don’t look for winning to become mandatory for a driver to be a champion.
“What I mean, though, is any format that we’ve ever had always has the possibility that somebody might win the championship without winning an event,” France said. “Short of us, which we’re not going to do, making it a hard prerequisite that you have to win a race to qualify. We don’t think that takes it out of balance frankly. And so I think it’s great. We have three drivers who competed and won; you’ve got one that didn’t. I do think whoever comes out as champion on Sunday probably needs to think about winning the race. I’d be surprised if one of those four drivers can get out of here with a championship, and what we’ve seen, if you go through past years, of how those teams will be elevating their game against everybody else no matter what people say ‑‑ you go back to Tony Stewart a few years ago, you go back to Jimmie Johnson when he needed to do what he needed to do or anybody else, those will be the teams, and they were last weekend in Phoenix, too, by the way, those will be the teams that will be running up front most of the day.”
France is entirely correct; winless champions have always been an unlikely possibility in all of NASCAR’s formats given the way that the points system is structured, especially after it was redone in 2011. But the disconnect comes because of the winning push.
It’s why, if NASCAR wants to make “modest” changes to the Chase, we’d suggest letting drivers carry the bonus points from wins in a round of the Chase to the next. While drivers get three extra points for every win in the first 26 races to start the Chase, the points are reset at the beginning of rounds two, three and four. In addition to guaranteeing advancement, three extra points could help a driver advance to the next round.
And no, we’re not suggesting this change because it would have affected the 2014 Chase. Jeff Gordon didn’t win in the second round and would still have been eliminated by Newman at Phoenix.
Or, if immodest changes would be possible, making the points system more top-heavy would reward drivers who finish at or near the front all season. In the current structure, a driver receives an extra point for each position higher he or she finishes. In the top 10, the gap could be two or three points a position, with five or 10 bonus points given to a race winner instead of the three given at the end of the race now that bumps the winner’s total from a minimum of 44 to 47.
That way, drivers could still be rewarded for consistent finishes and every position on the track would still matter in terms of points, but the impact of excellence would be heightened, making the push of winning more like truthtelling and less like carnival barking.
Will those somewhat-striking changes happen? Probably not. But given that the Chase has changed so frequently in its brief tenure already, modifications of some sort are likely coming sooner rather than later.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
