By Randy Covitz, Special to Kickin’ the Tires
NASCAR is celebrating an anniversary of sorts this season. It’s the 10th anniversary of its elimination-rounds playoff system and Kansas Speedway will play its part when the Round of 12 begins on Sunday with the Hollywood Casino 400.
In fact, Kansas Speedway has been part of the playoffs every year since the original post-season _ The Chase _ was inaugurated in 2004, replacing the traditional, season-long points standings. But in 2014, NASCAR went to a format that guaranteed playoff berths to regular-season race winners, followed by a post-season elimination format.
The 16-driver playoff field is reduced by four contenders every three weeks until four drivers are left to race in a winner-take-all season finale, now in Phoenix.
“It was probably the biggest change in our sport …. from how you win a championship, I think that we’ve ever seen, right?” said Joey Logano, the 2018 and 2022 Cup champion. “The introduction of the Chase, that was one piece that was pretty big, but I think when they started the playoff rounds, that’s equally as big, maybe bigger in the way it’s done. More do-or-die moments, right? More back up against the wall, got to make it happen moments.
“Equally as big as the playoffs is how they did the playoff points and making every race more important,” Logano said of a scoring system implemented in 2017 that rewarded drivers with extra points for winning stages of the races. “I think it works. I think it’s done really well. It has created a lot of drama in our sport. A lot more storylines …. So to me, if it’s lasted this long, I don’t see anything about it that I would change at this point. “
In the current format, regular-season wins are worth five playoff points and the regular-season champion earns 15 playoff points, while the runner-up gets 10. But winning the regular-season championship has not guaranteed anything in the playoffs. In fact, of the eight different drivers who have won the 10 championships since 2014, only three – Martin Truex Jr. in 2017; Kyle Busch in 2019 and Kyle Larson in 2021 – won the regular-season championships. Seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, who won his last title in the current format in 2016, never won a regular-season championship.
“I think it’s just like any other sport now,” said Logano, a three-time winner at Kansas Speedway. “You can have an incredible regular season and still lose the first game of the playoffs and be out. Well, the same thing happens here. You still get seeded off of how you do, right? You get those playoff points throughout the regular season that help you get through the playoffs, but it’s no guarantee you’re going to win the championship. I think that’s what makes it critical.”
During Larson’s championship season, he won 10 races, but if not for a great pitstop at Phoenix, he might not have been the champion. So even after dominating a season, the championship came down to something that close.
“It’s the system …,” Larson said. “I think it makes for storylines and whatnot. When we went into Phoenix with nine wins and dominated the year, I was like – man, I can’t believe.. and I was thinking about it right before that final caution, that I can’t believe we’ve been the best car all year and I’m going to finish fourth in points. And then the magic caution came out; we had a magic pitstop and the rest is history. But yeah, I think I’ve heard people mention that.
“I think I would be in favor of like a three-race little stretch to decide the champion, rather just one at Phoenix. I don’t know that we’ll ever see that, but yeah for right now, it is what it is. You have to be good everywhere, especially at Phoenix.”
Brad Keselowski won his championship in 2012 under the Chase format and has qualified for the playoffs system in all but one year since 2014.
“The playoffs were an interesting change to our sport,” Keselowski said. “There are people that like them and there are people that don’t like them. There are parts I like personally and parts I don’t like personally and the first year, in 2014, everybody was kind of getting to understand the system in real time. You read about it and you read the rules and all that, but you didn’t really fully understand how it would change the behaviors until you actually saw it.”
Certainly, the pressures of qualifying for the post-season and avoiding elimination during the playoffs added intensity and heightened competition to each race. That was underscored by Austin Dillon’s crashing Logano and Denny Hamlin off the track on the final lap at Richmond last month for the win and seemingly a spot in the playoffs. However, NASCAR penalized Dillon for the reckless driving, ruled he could not use that victory to qualify for the post-season and docked him 50 points, effectively eliminating him from the playoffs, unless he could have won one of the three remaining regular-season races, which he did not.
“I think there were definitely some behavioral changes in the garage and in the sport that are due to the playoffs,” Keselowski said. “We all needed a rep through it to see what that would be. It changed our sport. There’s no way of saying it didn’t. But the real effect of the playoffs to me was the next two or three seasons when people started to get comfortable with it. And then you started to see the playoffs actually have an effect on the rest of the season that wasn’t the playoffs, right? Because people had a better understanding for what that meant. So, it’s definitely been a change for our sport.”
Truex, who has reached the season-finale Championship race five times in his career, has one word for the current format. Stressful.
“It’s the most difficult to navigate because every three races guys get eliminated and you’re just stressed out the entire 10 weeks,” said Truex, who did not have a regular-season win but qualified for the playoffs as the 16th seed on points, only to be eliminated from the Round of 12 last week at Bristol.
“A big key to this thing now is to have the most bonus points when the playoffs start to fall back on if you have a bad day. It’s good that it rewards the guys who have been strong all year long, but also, there’s an opportunity for guys who haven’t maybe had the best of years to get hot in the playoffs and go a long way or go all the way to the Championship Four.
“There’s room for everyone to get it done if you perform at a high level when you need to.”