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<\/p>\nThe return of The Chase for the Championship has immediately been pitched to NASCAR fans as a return to civility.<\/p>\n
This of course doesn\u2019t mean a loss of intensity or consequence but those who were part of the announcement on Monday at NASCAR Productions believe that points racing will result in a product that is a little more professional.<\/p>\n
And in the process, everyone involved ultimately believes this is the key to winning back lapsed fans.<\/p>\n
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Chase Elliott, for example, believes that the playoff format used from 2014 to 2025 emphasized the wrong elements of Cup Series competition. The 2020 champion says The Playoffs created headlines and social media snippets for the wrong reasons.<\/p>\n
He pointed to the emphasis on last lap dive bombs and crashing other drivers to get the point needed to advance into the next round.<\/p>\n
\u201cLike all that stuff is good for your retweets and gets a lot of clicks and that’s fantastic for y’all,\u201d said Elliott to media in attendance after the announcement. \u201cBut at the end of the day, I think for your long-term integrity of what we do and what the sport is really about, what it was built on, the art behind passing and finesse, the things that separate a guy from being good to being great are not the last lap maneuvers we have seen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elliott pointed to the 2022 playoff race at Martinsville where Ross Chastain full-throttled against the wall in the now banned \u2018Hail Melon\u2019 to pass half a dozen cars and eliminate Denny Hamlin from the championship race.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always talk about how hard it is to pass, and how important track position is, so on and so forth,\u201d Elliott said. \u201cI watched Denny drive from about four cars back from me. I was running seventh or eighth. He drove up and passed me, didn\u2019t boot anyone out of the way, nothing crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Elliott said Hamlin put himself in position to advance \u2018the right way\u2019 but it was undone by Chastain, and he had a problem with that, even if it wasn\u2019t personal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m just like, \u2018man, we’re talking about the wrong thing here,\u2019 because you don\u2019t know how hard it is to do what Denny did to get himself in that position,\u201d Elliott said. \u201cInstead, we\u2019re promoting the craziness because it got us on SportsCenter that night and I just thought it was all wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo my point in all of that is this is a great step to not have as many of these chaotic moments and all of us (drivers) realizing there\u2019s enough time for this to come out with the wash.\u201d<\/p>\n
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To his point, the loudest advocate for a season long championship or at least a points racing format was Mark Martin, who said the craziness was not producing growth in the fanbase.<\/p>\n
So what was the point?<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole idea of the playoffs was to bring more of those fans and it has failed,\u201d Martin said. \u201cIt did not bring in enough of those fans in to offset what we lost. The classic race fans, many quit watching, and Jeff Burton says we can\u2019t get them back.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe may be right but maybe we can get some of them back. I hope we can get enough of them back to at least offset the ones that were watching just for the sparks and the flames because it\u2019s racing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can get fathers watching races with their kids, or grandfathers and their grandkids, that\u2019s how we cultivate new fans. We don\u2019t have to necessarily go out and change our on-track product as they call it. Let\u2019s be who we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That means points-based racing — even a version of it that has a single reset after the 26th race of the season with a 10-race runway to ultimately determine the champion.<\/p>\n
Ryan Blaney, the 2023 champion, echoed the sentiment that this will clean up the racing in additive ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like it also is going to — I sit back, and I look at this new format, and sometimes we all get grief about over aggressiveness and things like that, and sometimes you get put in these situations where it’s a win and move on type scenario,\u201d Blaney said. \u201cI think it’s going to clean up a lot of the racing side of it and get back to the purity side of it to where it is a little bit more of not brash, a little bit more of the beautiful art form that I grew up loving.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like his fellow Hall of Famer, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a full season points purist but also shares Martin\u2019s sentiment that this is a compromise that is at least comparable with the spirit of NASCAR.<\/p>\n
He says NASCAR spent too long chasing after stick-and-ball fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople either love motorsports or they don\u2019t,\u201d Earnhardt said. \u201cI don\u2019t know that we need to try and acquire all these features from other sports to attract them to what we do.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that\u2019s just wasting our time trying to attain a fan that doesn\u2019t exist and the numbers would say that. I\u2019m not an expert on the demographics and how to grow our audience but I do know that what we\u2019ve been trying to do to liken ourselves towards those other things haven\u2019t helped.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s not made a big difference. Motorsports is unique, right? We are unique in that how we settle the score and settle the season is different. We don\u2019t need to adopt these other things out there in the world. We had a pretty good system.\u201d<\/p>\n
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With that said, the Chase for the Championship is inherently a playoff format, but one that honors the NASCAR tradition of points racing. And again, it\u2019s going to emphasize racing over crashing over the final 10 weeks of the season.<\/p>\n
Chase Briscoe echoed the words of his peers.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not going to see the guy in 23rd driving through the guy in 22nd coming to the checkered flag,\u201d Briscoe said. \u201cEvery point is going to matter, certainly, but we\u2019re not going to have that cutoff race where guys are going to be doing crazy stuff to finish 17th or whatever.<\/p>\n
\u201cRacing for the win, guys are going to be a little bit smarter and because the points pay more for a win now, winning is still a huge incentive. It\u2019s 15 more points.\u201d<\/p>\n
The O\u2019Reilly Auto Parts and Craftsman Truck Series divisions will also adopt the Chase for the Championship for the first time and everyone involved hopes better habits are developed there now after a decade of demolition derby style racing over the course of several years.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not going to clean someone out for 14th,\u201d Briscoe said. \u201cYou won\u2019t have that anymore. Maybe when we get to the 26th race, and someone really needs that point, maybe but you\u2019re not going to see guys clean each other out multiple times a year or ride the wall at Martinsville.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another thing everyone in the room seemed to agree with, and disagreed with NASCAR\u2019s ultimate conclusion, was that 16 contenders was too many for a format that previously featured 10 and then 12.<\/p>\n
But Elliott again cited this format as a compromise.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought 10 was a really good number back in the day, just because it was really hard to get inside the top-10,\u201d Elliott said. \u201cIt is not as hard to get into 16th, but Mark said it perfectly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a compromise. You are not going to get everything you want. I do think this was a great piece of middle ground for us to land in and have everyone be as happy as they can be. Hopefully now, we can focus on what matters the most.\u201d<\/p>\n
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