NASCAR’s Martinsville controversy showed why the playoff system needs to be overhauled or scrapped entirely (video)

It’s time for NASCAR to embrace a radical idea and drastically overhaul its points system.

The vulnerabilities of the current playoff system were on full display again Sunday at Martinsville, as Chevrolet drivers refused to pass William Byron in the closing laps and Christopher Bell bounced off the wall several times as he passed a suddenly slowing Bubba Wallace in the final . round.

Bell’s pass from Wallace took him into Championship 4 about 20 minutes before that NASCAR ruled the move a “safety violation.” Bell was moved down in the running order and Byron joined race winner Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano and Tyler Reddick in the group of four drivers that will race for the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series on November 10 (3 p.m. ET, NBC) in Phoenix -title. .

NASCAR ditched the full-season points format in 2004 in favor of a 10-race postseason featuring the top drivers from the first 26 races. NASCAR was the fastest growing sports series in the country at the time and had designs on challenging the NFL for top billing among American sports fans. The final race of the 2003 season – a race that was not important for the title because Matt Kenseth had won the championship a week earlier – attracted more than 7.3 million viewers.

That playoff format has evolved several times in the two decades since its implementation. First it was expanded from 10 to 12 drivers and then expanded again to 16 in 2014, when NASCAR decided the 10 races should be split into four different rounds with a winner-take-all race involving four finalists.

After three seasons of chaos and small samples having too big an impact, the play-off system was changed again in 2017 with the introduction of stage points. Four rounds remained, but drivers were allowed to carry over bonus points from race and stage wins in the hope that four of the season’s best drivers would battle for the title in the final race.

That is the format that still exists today. And after seven years it must disappear. NASCAR’s teams and manufacturers have become too good at gaming the system.

Just look at how the final laps at Martinsville unfolded. Being just one position away from losing his spot in Championship 4 as the only Chevrolet representative, Byron had two Chevy drivers behind him, Ross Chastain and Austin Dillon. Neither driver qualified for the post-season, although in the waning laps they appeared to have faster cars than Byron – who complained after the race about his long-distance pace due to the damage he had suffered earlier.

Neither driver made a move on Byron. Instead, both drivers raced side by side with Byron running ahead of them.

Since it was clear that Byron would not be passed by the drivers behind him, Toyota driver Bubba Wallace radioed to his crew that he had a flat tire. While Blaney’s final lap lasted approximately 21.4 seconds, Wallace’s final lap lasted 24.9 seconds.

This allowed Bell, also a lap down, to pass Wallace in Turns 3 and 4. As Bell made the move, his car visibly loosened and hit the wall. He hit the wall again and again as he gassed it to the finish line and didn’t gain a single spot.

The pass seemed to take him to the playoffs. But NASCAR had seen a similar move before. In 2022, Ross Chastain floored his car against the outside wall to sneak into the title race. After the season, NASCAR said moves like Chastain’s would no longer be allowed in the future.

Bell’s move wasn’t exactly the same as Chastain’s. But that wasn’t good enough for NASCAR, which brought Byron back into the championship final at Bell’s expense.

No penalties were immediately imposed on Wallace, Chastain or Dillon. And who knows, maybe NASCAR will do some digging and penalize them during the week. After all, the sanctioning body does have a rule that states that drivers and teams must try to achieve the best possible finish in an event.

Longtime NASCAR fans will vividly remember why that rule exists. In 2013, Clint Bowyer spun around Richmond on purpose to try to beat his Michael Waltrip Racing teammate Martin Truex Jr. to get to the play-offs. In the days following the race, NASCAR kicked Truex out of the playoffs and added both Ryan Newman and Jeff Gordon to the field while expanding the playoff field from 12 to 13.

The race manipulation scandal was enormous. And Sunday made it clear that teams and manufacturers are still manipulating races in a similar way.

Not much has changed since Bowyer rolled around 11 years ago. A year later, Ryan Newman dumped Kyle Larson in Phoenix to enter the championship race. Kevin Harvick made a rather suspicious move at the end of a Talladega playoff race in 2015, even though he denied ever seeing Trevor Bayne before hitting Bayne’s car. In 2022, Cole Custer was fined 50 points for slowing down to let teammate Chase Briscoe pass in an elimination race. These examples are also far from the only ones. After the race at Daytona in August, Xfinity Series driver Parker Retzlaff admitted he had no intention of pushing Ford driver Harrison Burton to victory and an automatic spot in the playoffs.

Let’s be clear: you can’t blame teams and drivers for doing what they could to help each other. They are heavily incentivized by NASCAR’s current monetary system. Playoff teams make significantly more money at the end of the season than non-playoff teams. And the constructors’ title is still an important aspect of racing.

But racing is also a sport with a large sample size, just like baseball. And NASCAR’s current four-round playoff format gives teams too many opportunities to manipulate small, sample-size races.

NASCAR teams are incredibly smart and prepare for almost any scenario. And it’s much easier to prepare for scenarios in a three-race playoff round than in a full 36-race season.

As NASCAR’s ratings have dropped dramatically over the past decade, it’s clear the playoff system isn’t attracting casual viewers. Last season’s winner-take-all title race drew just over half as many viewers as the “pointless” season finale in 2003.

NASCAR has nothing to lose by changing the playoff format again. Casual fans clearly don’t leave NFL games for playoff races. A good compromise would be a return to the 10-race play-off format of the 2000s. But an even better and fairer solution for everyone involved would be a season title race, as Formula 1 and IndyCar have done. Yes, both series have smaller TV ratings than NASCAR in the United States, but racing fans will tune in for good, hard racing whether there’s a title on the line or not.

NASCAR’s audience currently consists exclusively of racing fans. It owes its drivers and teams the opportunity to show who is the best all season long. And not only can he be the best at gaming the system in the fall.