NASCAR is right to guarantee spots

I know fans really get tired of having sportswriters tell them what’s good for them when it comes to their favorite sport, but here goes.

A lot of NASCAR fans think they would like to see the rules changed so that the fastest 43 cars make each week’s Nextel Cup race. That’s it. You go fast enough, you’re in. No provisionals, no safety net, no nothing. A strict meritocracy.

Sorry, but that really is not what you want. Not at all.

I am not saying the current rules are perfect.

Guaranteeing the top 35 in the standings a spot in each week’s race does put an extreme onus on the “have nots” who have to race their way in for the other seven or eight spots each week.

For a long time, I’ve thought that number ought to be cut back to the top 25, but I don’t think that’s the right answer, either. I know fans will hate to hear this, but 25 isn’t enough for the very reason that you need 35 to start with.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

There are really two reasons you need guaranteed spots in the first place, no matter how you do that. The first one is obvious. If what happened to A.J. Allmendinger in qualifying Friday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway – his car started missing and he didn’t complete a lap – happens to Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Tony Stewart, there has to be a way for Earnhardt Jr. or Stewart to be in the race.

You can say what you want to, but NASCAR needs its biggest stars racing each weekend.
Stewart and Allmendinger should be treated equally in almost every way by NASCAR, but until Allmendinger has at least made a race or two you can’t say he brings as many people to the track as Stewart does. Stewart’s fans buy tickets and make travel plans expecting to see their guy race, and he needs to race even if something screwy happens to his car in qualifying.

You could at least partially accomplish that the “old” way, by putting the top 36 cars in the race based on speed and then assigning provisionals from the top of the points standings down.

But the top 35 guarantee makes more sense because it more likely ensures the top teams will be in the race each week even if early in a given season they’ve had bad luck and find themselves well back in the pack. Kasey Kahne, for example, is 36th in the current standings, and he needs to be racing on Sundays.

The real reason that NASCAR is right to guarantee spots for a certain number of its teams, though, has more to do with the teams and the sponsors than it does the drivers.

If an owner and a sponsor are willing to commit to racing every week, there should be some benefit in that, some advantage. It’s certainly true that some full-season teams and sponsors are being sent home now, but the only way to prevent that is to guarantee any full-time team a starting spot even if that means expanding starting fields beyond 43 cars.

I think that goes too far. The NASCAR garage shouldn’t be a closed shop, with only those willing and capable to run 36 races having any shot to compete. There has to be room for new teams, for teams with partial schedule plans to get their feet wet in the big pond.

Going to 25 exempt teams, though, goes too far I think. That comes off as another case of the rich getting richer, the haves getting more than the have nots. The top 25 teams are almost always going to be the ones with the most resources, and therefore the ones likely to get the most exposure that keeps that kind of support coming.

The real benefit of the current system falls on those teams that are 26th through 35th in the standings, I think. These are the guys who don’t get into the top 10 all that often, who don’t get the maximum television exposure. But if they go into a season knowing they’re going to make the first five races, they know they have a chance of staying in the exempt group and that makes them more appealing to sponsors.

What about new teams? Well, shouldn’t it be at least a little bit harder for somebody new to come in and take away a spot from a team that has been part of the sport? Shouldn’t there be at least some hurdle for new teams to clear?

It might be fair to argue that the current hurdle is too high to clear. Is it too easy for teams to stay in the top 35 and too hard for anybody to ever fight its way in? If more spots were available through qualifying, wouldn’t that give new teams a more equitable chance of carving out its place in the sport?

If you’re going to change anything, I’ve about decided that what you should do is guarantee the top 30 in points starting spots in the races. That allows at least 12 teams to make the race on speed. Maybe you could make that 13 by going ahead and starting 44 cars – there’s really no good reason not to fill out that last row with one more car.

But that’s as far as I am willing to go.