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player ready...NASCAR will emphasize winning individual races more than ever and will expand its Chase for the Nextel Cup playoff field from 10 to 12 drivers under new rules announced Monday for the 2007 season.
An additional five points will be awarded to race winners, but the big bonus for outright winning will come during the Chase, whose field will be seeded according to who has the most wins in the regular season.
For example, Kasey Kahne, who was seeded 10th and last in last year’s Chase because of overall points accumulation, would have been seeded first under the new format because of his league-leading five regular-season victories.
NASCAR long has been criticized for weighting consistency–decent finishes–more than winning races under its past point structure. Mark Martin and Jeff Burton qualified for the playoffs last year with no victories during the regular season. Matt Kenseth won the championship in 2003 with only one race victory.
“After all, winning is what this sport is all about,” team owner Richard Childress said in welcoming the changes.
“I don’t like, and no one likes, to hear a driver get out of their car and say, `I’m happy with an eighth-place finish,'” NASCAR Chairman Brian France acknowledged in announcing the changes.
“On the other hand, there are 43 teams that compete on the same field at the same time [in each of the 36 Cup races], and we only have one winner. So, obviously, our sport is different.”
France referred to what he called “the intersection between winning and consistency,” and said NASCAR felt a need to “make sure the balance is right” between the two.
Driver Carl Edwards fretted that “a bad day can [still] hurt you so badly in the points,” and that “they’ve made the discrepancy between a great day (a win) and a good day (driverspeak for a top-10 finish) a little bigger.”
But Edwards acknowledged that with “two more cars in the Chase . . . you could have more bad days and still make it.”
Asked whether expanding the playoff field to 12 drivers might dilute the impact of the playoffs, France countered that “we’re going into the [season-opening] Daytona 500 with 40-plus teams that are fully funded and ready to compete for the championship. So I think we’re deep enough for a 12-driver field.”
Once the field is determined after the final regular-season race in September, all playoff contenders will have their points equalized at 5,000 apiece–except that each will get a 10-point bonus in the seeding structure for each regular-season win.
Some critics had called for NASCAR to weight winning by as many as 50 extra points. Though the new system falls far short of that, it actually adds a net 15 points per regular-season win, counting the Chase seeding.
NASCAR added five additional points for winning three years ago, for a net total now of 20 extra points from the old structure.
Now a driver will receive 185 base points for a win, plus an automatic five bonus points for leading at least one lap. Another five are awarded for leading the most laps, so “if a driver does everything right, he can walk away [from a given race] with 195 points,” France said.
Factor in the 10 seed points for the Chase, and a championship-contending driver is actually capable of netting a de facto 205 points, as opposed to 170 for finishing second–an actual spread of 35.
Where teams previously were often satisfied with high finishes rather than gambling on outright wins, “I think you’re going to see some people make some different calls in the pits,” team owner Chip Ganassi said.
“It’s going to make the races better–certainly the racing at the front better.”
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