Yet another incident has bolstered Tony Stewart’s argument for separate races, or at least a separate point system, for NASCAR’s playoff contenders.
You’d hate to see a guy lose the Chase for the championship the way Jeff Burton might: because a non-Chaser, a repeat offender at interfering with playoffs he is not a part of, cheated to affect a race outcome at Atlanta on Sunday night.
Robby Gordon has denied throwing roll-bar padding out his window to cause an unwarranted caution period, but NASCAR has convicted him on video evidence.
That caution cost Burton an unknowable number of points. He’d pitted under green just before the leaders got free stops under the ill-gotten yellow.
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NASCAR has docked Gordon 50 driver points and 50 car-owner points — both hurt him because he owns his own team — and fined him $15,000.
But that does nothing to help Burton, or erase the latest tinge on a playoff system still groping for legitimacy.
NASCAR is the only professional sport that allows its also-rans to continue competing right on through the playoffs. And worse, it allows them to affect the championship itself.
Imagine that in the next Super Bowl, members of teams that didn’t even make the playoffs were allowed to run onto the field and participate. Their clips, holds and cheap shots could affect the outcome, without remedy for the victims.
That’s what NASCAR allows in the Chase.
Gordon, 28th in points (Chasers are the top 10) had reason to covet a caution more than anyone else with 35 laps left at Atlanta. He was the first driver who wasn’t on the lead lap, and therefore became the beneficiary of the caution, getting a free pass into the lead lap.
“We have no way of knowing what the outcome would have been had that caution not come out,” Burton said this week. He meant the race. But that also applies to the championship.
Safe to say if Burton loses this Chase by 19 points or less, we can always wonder. That’s the difference between Burton’s 13th-place finish and what might have been, ninth, right behind the next-lowest finishing Chaser in that race, Denny Hamlin, eighth.
And it’s possible Burton was robbed of more than that–that he might have finished even higher.
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