Sunday’s race at Sonoma kicks off four road events over 10 weeks that likely kill a storyline that has existed since mid-March. It will also draw new attention to the flaws of the NASCAR playoffs.
We should have learned our lesson on these two points a year ago, but we did not. Austin Cindric is about to refresh our memories.
Stop worrying that there are too many winners in the regular season
Counting the end of last year, the number of drivers under 30 winning NASCAR Cup Series races reached 12 six weeks into the 2022 season. Rookie Austin Cindric kicked things off in surprising the field at the Daytona 500. Once Denny Hamlin won in Week 7, the talk turned to how there was a new winner every week.
With 11 races remaining in the 26-week regular season, fans have seen 11 different winners. The conversation is rife about how the track could see 16 winners, which would exclude non-winners from the NASCAR playoffs. Worse, a 17th the driver could reach Victory Lane, hitting someone who had won a race.
It is very likely that the worries will cease over the next two months. Beginning Sunday at Sonoma and ending Aug. 21 at Watkins Glen, four of the next ten races will take place on road courses, where only a handful of drivers excel.
The main one is Chase Elliott, who has won half of his 14 career victories on road courses. Teammate Kyle Larson was blazing in qualifying Saturday while winning the Sonoma pole and is coming off a season in which he won three road races. Meanwhile, Ross Chastain holds victory in the first road race of the season.
Austin Cindric will be a hot topic heading into the NASCAR playoffs
With Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson and Ross Chastain all owning wins this season, they won’t increase the number of unique winners. Add in AJ Allmendinger, who won the Xfinity race at Portland last weekend, and the previous winners or Allmendinger (he is not eligible for NASCAR’s playoffs in the Cup Series) could win the road races remaining.
That would leave the Cup Series with 11 unique winners in 19 races. In the other seven on ovals, Ryan Blaney and Martin Truex Jr. looked too strong not to win at one point, but we’re going to project the previous winners to chew up the other wins.
This leaves three drivers ahead on points. If the season ended before Sonoma, the three would be Christopher Bell, Aric Almirola and Tyler Reddick. The fact is, however, that Kevin Harvick, Erik Jones and Austin Dillon would be left out despite having more points than Chase Briscoe, Kurt Busch, Austin Cindric and Denis Hamlinall of whom won races.
Hamlin deserves a pass for winning twice. But Harvick, Jones and Dillon all have more top-10 finishes than winners below them. In fact, Dillon only has one top-10 finish since Daytona.
An outsider looking into the area would ask the question: Why bother awarding points if they don’t do much good for a driver to qualify for the NASCAR playoffs?
HOuch to fix the NASCAR playoffs in the future
The 2021 NASCAR playoffs brought up the same problem we seem destined to repeat. Like Austin Cindric, Michael McDowell followed a Daytona 500 victory with a nondescript rest of the season. Three drivers qualified on points, but Austin Dillon, Matt DiBenedetto, Chris Buescher, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Bubba Wallace and Ross Chastain all finished ahead of race winners McDowell and Aric Almirola in regular season points.
What can be done to strengthen the look of the NASCAR playoffs?
The first, and least controversial, approach would be to revamp the points system to reward winners. Since drivers can earn up to 20 stage points without reaching the checkered flag first, winners often walk away with fewer points for the day than some drivers finishing behind them. If winning races is a crucial factor in NASCAR’s playoff criteria, then winning should mean more.
Second, consider guaranteeing two or three of the 16 playoff spots to the highest winless drivers on the points list, provided they finish at least a few spots ahead of at least two drivers with wins. That would certainly add some intensity to the final races of the regular season, and winners finishing that low don’t deserve a free pass.
Finally, there’s the nuclear option: reducing the number of drivers in the playoffs to 12, the same size as in 2014. That would all but guarantee that some race winners will miss the NASCAR playoffs. It would also ensure that drivers who win in March but only achieve three or four additional top 10 results by mid-July will have to put in an honest run over the final month.
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