Bashers beware, points battle could be all but over
Kenny Bruce
Kenny Bruce is a three-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association's George Cunningham Writer of the Year Award. He joined Street & Smith's Sports Group in 2001.
It took five races for the bashing of NASCAR’s Chase For The Sprint Cup to heat up, which I guess is somewhat surprising.
With a couple of Chase guys already looking ahead to 2010, I thought the complaints would have started much sooner.
For the record, I didn’t hear Denny Hamlin say he didn’t agree with the Chase format, or that he pined for days gone by when champions were determined through a season-long points battle.
Perhaps he did, but I didn’t catch that during his brief interview on television.
Hamlin, who suffered his second consecutive setback when he fell out of Saturday’s race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, simply stated a fact: In a 10-race battle for the championship, one mistake can take a team out of the title picture.
Well, that’s no different than before NASCAR adopted the Chase format.
The Chase has simply given more teams an opportunity to contend for the championship by resetting the point standings for the top 12 drivers after the season’s 26th race.
Get rid of the Chase, and heading into Saturday night’s race, Tony Stewart would have been leading Jeff Gordon by 180 points and Jimmie Johnson by 188. Instead, the top seven drivers were separated by 188 points.
No fan likes it when his or her driver falls out of contention. No team likes it when it happens, either.
But without the Chase, most of these teams would have been history long before this week’s race.
Sometimes that’s a fact that is forgotten in the heat of the moment.
