Opinion: Are Changes to NASCAR’s Chase for the Championship Imminent?

They are, if you believe the latest media reports out of NASCAR heartland, Charlotte, North Carolina. And I've learned that, where there's smoke, there's almost always fire. These things don't get leaked by accident. Sometime between now and Speedweeks at Daytona, I believe there'll be changes announced.

In order to understand the situation with NASCAR's Chase for the Sprint Cup, let's go right back to it's beginning.

Since it’s inception, the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup has been a majorly contentious subject amongst fans. Over it’s controversial lifespan, we’ve seen either ten or twelve drivers (plus wild cards) separated from the rest of the field for a 12-race competition to decide the season’s Sprint Cup champion.

Brian France, the brainchild of perhaps NASCAR’s most talked-about facet, openly admitted that the concept was purely and simply created for television. He wanted to give NBC something better at the end of the season, when Sunday afternoon races went up against the might of the National Football League. It was all for the fans, France said. The problem is, of course, that the majority of the fans hated the idea.

Count me in that group. It seems unfair if a driver goes through the first twenty-six races of the year and totally dominates, but when it comes down to the final ten races, most of the giant points buffer he’s worked up beginning in the winter, and through a consistent spring and summer, suddenly goes by the by. It changes the entire complexion of the season. 

One day soon, we’re going to have a situation where a driver who wins seven or eight times during the ‘regular season’ is beset by bad luck mostly not of his making during the Chase playoffs, and misses out on a Sprint Cup Championship that, under the old rules, and because of so much success over the first three quarters of the season, there’s going to be a major uproar. It doesn’t seem fair that a driver can come in and put together ten good weeks after, say, only winning once all year and relying on a Wild Card entry, yet that is what the Chase promotes.

Yes, I know that NASCAR wanted to shake things up, and generate some new enthusiasm in the season’s stretch run. I’ll admit that the Chase does serve to turn a well-decided championship hunt into a close contest between multiple drivers, which is theoretically supposed to bring about publicity and great television numbers. Instead, most people have realised the Chase for what it is: a manufactured end to a long season, and a desperate attempt to draw eyeballs away from the NFL.

One solution is to shorten the season – and the races, too, but that’s another article for another day – because it’s pretty clear that the Chase isn’t working. It didn’t really work in it’s initial form, and tweaks to the system haven't done much to energise the excitement of the NASCAR fan base. Nor have the television numbers made much of a dent into the juggernaut that is the NFL.

Yes, it can be said that a championship hasn’t been clinched until the checkered flag of the final race of the season on multiple occasions during the Chase’s run, I can’t remember more than twice (the inaugural season in 2004 was good and Tony Stewart's last-gasp win in 2011 was epic) where there was serious, gripping drama that held me right til the very end, and didn’t make me flip to NFL football. Let’s be honest here: if NASCAR’s powers-that-be down in Daytona Beach were happy with the current state of the Chase, they wouldn’t be changing it. The “Game 7” environment that Brian France has often talked about wanting just hasn’t materialised.

Yet, here we are, reading media reports about the possible changes to the format, ones that might be coming for 2014. It’s been said that the Chase field will increase from twelve to sixteen, and – wait for it – there may be a series of elimination rounds, apparently after the third, sixth and ninth race of the Chase. The season would then culminate in a winner-takes-all season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Does this strike anyone else as being something that you might find in pro wrestling?

Here’s a suggestion: if we are to make a change, let’s get rid of the Chase format altogether. It isn’t exciting. You fire a crew chief who isn’t winning, so why not bin a concept that isn’t making the sort of waves that NASCAR hoped (and apparently expected) it would? We’ve endured tweaks and changes on a few occasions now, and we’ve hoped that they would kick-start the concept, but the reality is that it hasn’t helped.

I don’t know that anything can help, but I do know that throwing the Chase open to just about half the field is not the way to go. It cheapens the idea of winning a NASCAR Sprint Cup Championship. Return to the old points system, a season-long endurance test. It seems to work well enough for Formula One, Indycar, sports cars and every other major racing series on earth. I’m sure if you took a poll of fans, you’d be seeing many more votes ‘for’ than ‘against’ going back to the old championship style.

We don’t need manufactured drama. Instead of trying to create competition gimmicks, NASCAR would be better served working on the cars and the aero packages to return frequent side-by-side competition to the racetrack. That is what fans want to see. Not some manufactured ten-race championship hunt that, more or less, disregards the first twenty-six weeks of the season. Especially not when the television broadcast tends to ignore all but the twelve drivers in the Chase, sometimes, inexplicably, even when a non-Chaser is running up in the top five.

If there must be a change, NASCAR, let’s go back to the old days. It might just be the kick-start the sport needs to start clawing back ratings and interest during the NFL-heavy autumn months.