Views from the Grandstands
NASCAR's 2009 season is well under way, not that it matters all that much. Nowadays everything comes down to the last 10 races. I am not, to put it mildly, a fan of the Chase for the Cup, but, having finally learned a lesson from my husband, I'm not going to nag (this time) about the need to get rid of it. Instead, I'm going to argue (that's better than nagging, right?) that since the Chase represents less than a third of the overall season, NASCAR needs to hand out some more hardware to reward achievements from the rest of the races. Specifically, let's augment the Sprint Cup with two more titanic trophies to give NASCAR its own true Triple Crown. NASCAR and its sponsors already give out a bunch of smallish awards. The most well-known is the Coors Light Pole Award, where the weekly pole winners collect $5,500 for their efforts and qualify for the Budweiser Shootout at Daytona each February. There's also the Goodyear Gatorback Fastest Lap Award for the driver who turns the fastest lap while leading each race, not to mention the Wix Filters Lap Leader Award, which goes to the driver who leads the most laps each week. The USG Improving the Finish Award is given to the driver who moves up the most positions from his starting spot to his finishing position, while the Dow Automotive Strategic Call of the Race Award goes to the team that makes the best, well, strategic call during the race. There's more, but you get the picture. I say if the sponsors are happy, I'm happy. These drivers and their teams deserve all the recognition they can get for their excellence in all these oft-unheralded but crucial aspects of big-time racing. But enough already with these piddly awards. It's time for NASCAR to invest some serious cash and promotion in a true Triple Crown that'd give us three gorgeous, prestigious trophies and some serious cash prizes to go with them. We're stuck with the Chase, so the Sprint Cup (or whatever it'll eventually morph into in this sponsor-challenged economy) can stay. But what about the guy who rules the regular sea-son? I'm no fan of Kyle Busch, but it's a shame the kid didn't get squat for dominating so much of 2008 and being the big points leader when the Chase rolled around. Besides, regular-season excellence determined the NASCAR champion for decades, and even now teams need regular-season excellence to qualify for the Chase. So the second jewel of this new Triple Crown would be the Byron Bowl, presented to the driver atop the point standings going into the Chase. This trophy would be named after Robert Red Byron, who won the first officially sanctioned NASCAR race in February 1948 and claimed the inaugural NASCAR championship that same year. Since 2004, when the Chase concept was initiated, our Byron Bowl winners would have been: Jeff Gordon in 2004, Tony Stew-art in 2005, Matt Kenseth in 2006, Jimmie Johnson in 2007 and, of course, Busch in 2008. Not a bad bunch. 36 TRUCKERS NEWS MARCH 2009 DRIVER DIVERSIONS Views from the Grandstands NASCAR's grueling season deserves three accolades to award drivers' accomplishments By Kay Bell Kyle Busch excelled in all three national series, win-ning a combined 21 races in the NASCAR Sprint Cup, NASCAR Nationwide and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series but he fell shy of No. 1 in the Chase. RUSTY JARRETT/GETTY IMAGES FOR NASCAR A Triple Crown