NASCAR drivers, legends say new format is about legitimacy

The return of The Chase for the Championship has immediately been pitched to NASCAR fans as a return to civility.

This of course doesn’t 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.

And in the process, everyone involved ultimately believes this is the key to winning back lapsed fans.

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.

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.

“Like all that stuff is good for your retweets and gets a lot of clicks and that’s fantastic for y’all,” said Elliott to media in attendance after the announcement. “But 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.”

Elliott pointed to the 2022 playoff race at Martinsville where Ross Chastain full-throttled against the wall in the now banned ‘Hail Melon’ to pass half a dozen cars and eliminate Denny Hamlin from the championship race.

“We always talk about how hard it is to pass, and how important track position is, so on and so forth,” Elliott said. “I watched Denny drive from about four cars back from me. I was running seventh or eighth. He drove up and passed me, didn’t boot anyone out of the way, nothing crazy.”

Elliott said Hamlin put himself in position to advance ‘the right way’ but it was undone by Chastain, and he had a problem with that, even if it wasn’t personal.

“I’m just like, ‘man, we’re talking about the wrong thing here,’ because you don’t know how hard it is to do what Denny did to get himself in that position,” Elliott said. “Instead, we’re promoting the craziness because it got us on SportsCenter that night and I just thought it was all wrong.

“So 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’s enough time for this to come out with the wash.”

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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.

So what was the point?

“The whole idea of the playoffs was to bring more of those fans and it has failed,” Martin said. “It 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’t get them back.

“He 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’s racing.

“If we can get fathers watching races with their kids, or grandfathers and their grandkids, that’s how we cultivate new fans. We don’t have to necessarily go out and change our on-track product as they call it. Let’s be who we are.”

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.

Ryan Blaney, the 2023 champion, echoed the sentiment that this will clean up the racing in additive ways.

“I 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,” Blaney said. “I 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.”

Like his fellow Hall of Famer, Dale Earnhardt Jr. is a full season points purist but also shares Martin’s sentiment that this is a compromise that is at least comparable with the spirit of NASCAR.

He says NASCAR spent too long chasing after stick-and-ball fans.

“People either love motorsports or they don’t,” Earnhardt said. “I don’t know that we need to try and acquire all these features from other sports to attract them to what we do.

“I think that’s just wasting our time trying to attain a fan that doesn’t exist and the numbers would say that. I’m not an expert on the demographics and how to grow our audience but I do know that what we’ve been trying to do to liken ourselves towards those other things haven’t helped.

“It’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’t need to adopt these other things out there in the world. We had a pretty good system.”

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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’s going to emphasize racing over crashing over the final 10 weeks of the season.

Chase Briscoe echoed the words of his peers.

“You’re not going to see the guy in 23rd driving through the guy in 22nd coming to the checkered flag,” Briscoe said. “Every point is going to matter, certainly, but we’re not going to have that cutoff race where guys are going to be doing crazy stuff to finish 17th or whatever.

“Racing 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’s 15 more points.”

The O’Reilly 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.

“You’re not going to clean someone out for 14th,” Briscoe said. “You won’t have that anymore. Maybe when we get to the 26th race, and someone really needs that point, maybe but you’re not going to see guys clean each other out multiple times a year or ride the wall at Martinsville.”

Another thing everyone in the room seemed to agree with, and disagreed with NASCAR’s ultimate conclusion, was that 16 contenders was too many for a format that previously featured 10 and then 12.

But Elliott again cited this format as a compromise.

“I thought 10 was a really good number back in the day, just because it was really hard to get inside the top-10,” Elliott said. “It is not as hard to get into 16th, but Mark said it perfectly.

“This 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.”

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