Race In Kansas

Banquet 400: Winning Isn't Everything?
By Christopher Harris

It's time for a change.

Three events into the Chase for the Championship, which I'll once again admit is a success story that I didn't see coming, and there's exactly one format adjustment I'd make. I'm not claiming I'm the first to think of it, but I'll bang the drum a little louder. (No, I'm not talking about fewer commercials, or side-by-side racing. That's needed even more, but corporate whore-mongering is what our sport does best.) Here's my latest stump: winning should count more.

As it is, the Chase is turning into a war of attrition. It doesn't matter if you win, as much as it matters if you don't finish 40th. And that's dumb.

NASCAR needs to award bonus points to an event's winner. It's really stupid that the first-place driver receives just 10 points more than the second-place finisher. And heck, if the second-place guy happens to lead the most laps, it's just a five-point margin. What incentive do teams have to really "go for it" in these 10 races? Shoot, did you hear Matt Kenseth after last Sunday's race in Dover? Kenseth was peeved because his crew chief told him to go for it, and they wound up running out of gas. And Kenseth's logic, while it seems backwards on its face, actually makes perfect sense: if the #17 team had simply come in for a splash of gas, gone to the tail end of the lead lap, and finished fifth, it would've been a better day than trying for the win, running out of fuel, and finishing 10th. The risk-reward ratio, in Kenseth's (correct) mind, wasn't worth the risk. Was he going to get so many more points if his fuel held on and he won the race? No. Finishing fifth with no risk would've been better.

And that's dumb. This is sports. Don't you want guys busting their humps to win, not massaging their humps to finish seventh?