It was a microcosm of everything that’s wrong with NASCAR. A point system that rewards finishing and actually punishes racing.
A playoff patterned after those in pro football, baseball and basketball that doesn’t work because NASCAR isn’t pro football, baseball or basketball.
A championship race where you don’t have to win anything to win everything. That’s how Kyle Larson, who never led a lap and finished third in the race, ended up with the title.
But don’t blame Larson. He just did what he needed to do under the current format. Blame NASCAR, which refuses to recognize that stock car racing is not like any stick-and-ball sport and needs to do its own thing in its own way.
By all odds Denny Hamlin, the best driver in the sport right now and one of the best all-time, should have won Sunday’s last race at Phoenix and the championship.
But he didn’t, and it’s time for NASCAR to realize that because of the nature of the sport, it can’t have a playoff. The champion has to be determined by a body of work over a full season.
A quarterback can throw a costly interception in the first quarter of the Super Bowl and come back and throw the winning touchdown pass in the fourth.
A baseball player can strike out in the first inning of the final game of the World Series and get the winning hit in the ninth.
A basketball player can miss every shot in the first half and win the game with a basket at the buzzer in the second.
But in NASCAR, if you blow a tire or hit the wall or if a caution falls at the wrong time, unlike other sports, you can’t recover from that. You’re done.
And the final race at Phoenix is an example. Hamlin and William Bryon dominated the day, but got almost no credit for it because of the way the point system is structured.
Between the two of them, they led 223 of the 254 green flag laps, this according to lapraptor.com. Until Byron blew a right front and wrecked on lap 309, neither one of them had ever run out of the top 10 and most of the time they ran in the top three or four.
But because NASCAR awards points based on where you finish, not how you compete, Byron got four points for finishing 33rd, meaning 32 drivers got more despite the fact virtually none of them deserved more.
One was Justin Haley, who finished 14th and got 23 points. Again according to lapraptor.com, Haley never led a single lap, never ran a lap in the top 10 and spent the vast majority of the race running in the 20s or 30s. He managed to get to 14th at the end of the race.
Then there’s the matter of how drivers make the playoffs. All you have to do is win one race and you’re in. Austin Cindric, who has been an anchor around the neck of Penske Motorsports and virtually non-competitive for years, won at Talladega.
So he got in despite the fact anybody can win a superspeedway race and he did
absolutely nothing the rest of the season, recording just two top fives. On the Old Guy Sport competition index, a better judge of who’s running well and who isn’t than the NASCAR points system, Cindric scored just 43 points.
For comparison Hamlin, the OGS champion, had 677 and Larson, second in the OGS rankings, had 530. Ryan Blaney was third with 516 and Chase Briscoe fourth with 507.
Three others who used the ‘win and you’re in’ crutch to make the playoffs were Austin Dillon, whose lone victory was at Richmond and who didn’t have another top five finish; Ross Chastain, who won at Charlotte and had four other top fives; and Shane van Gisbergen.
Van Gisbergen had an impressive five wins, all of them on road courses where he established himself as one of the best ever in NASCAR at that discipline, but he didn’t have a single top five on ovals, the bread-and-butter of NASCAR racing.
Commenting after the Phoenix race, Hamlin summed up his disappointment. “I did the best I could,” he said dejectedly according to NASCAR’s website. “Everything I prepared for happened. I felt like we responded. Even losing track position at one point, just battling back.
“I did really well on restarts and I hadn’t been good on restarts for the bulk of the year,” he said. “This team brought a great championship car and I felt like I drove it just right up until two laps to go (actually, Hamlin was pretty much trapped at the bottom of the track for the last two laps so there really wasn’t much he could do).
“I don’t know. It’s just so unfortunate. Gosh, you work so hard. This sport can drive you absolutely crazy,” Hamlin continued, “because sometimes speed, talent, all that stuff, just does not matter.”
He’s right. And NASCAR needs to change that.