Crazy Woman Driver: It's Time to Change the Chase
By Kay Bell CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER It's a new year, but I still hate the Chase for the Championship. NASCAR isn't a stick-and-ball sport, so it didn't need to try to rein-vent itself by adding a playoff. The ostensible reason was that, too often under the old system, the championship was decided well before the last race was run. Guess what? That's still happening. The real, and wrong, reason the Chase was created was to appease the TV suits, who were tired of losing their Sunday viewers to football in the fall. They thought if they could adver-tise their races as a playoff, they could pry a few eyes from the gridiron. That hasn't worked out. Part of the problem is that the 48 team has this Chase thing licked. Good for them, but bad for the fans and TV networks. NASCAR is obviously committed to the Chase, so I've resigned myself to dealing with this faux faceoff. But I do have some suggestions on how it can improve it. Return to 10 When the Chase started, only 10 drivers made the cut. Then Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. didn't make it in, so NASCAR expanded the field. Bad idea. It was obvious that the change was made as a knee-jerk reaction to two popular drivers missing out. Any pretense that the so-called play-off was legitimate vanished when NASCAR expanded it. So go back to the top 10. If Junior or Jeff or Jimmie (yeah, right!) misses out, it's just one of them racing deals. Let winners in Is 10 not enough cars? Then let's include everyone who wins a regu-lar-season race. NASCAR finally acknowledged that fans (and competitors) value wins by increasing the points awarded for a win. And the number of wins count even more when it comes to Chase seeding. But this season, two of the big-gest winners and most compelling racers were on the verge of missing the Chase. Mark Martin made it. Kyle Busch didn't. Jimmie Johnson's frequent appearances in Victory Lane have lead him to win the past four NASCAR Sprint Cup championships. WWW.CHANGINGLANESDIGITAL.COM JANUARY CHANGING LANES 13 CL0110_CWD.indd 13 12/6/09 4:30 PM