If I Ran NASCAR
Part II: Second Round Qualifying
There was an announcement last week that NASCAR was considering a change to the second round qualifying rules. Up to this point, a team that fails to make one of the top twenty-five times in the first round has the choice of either standing on their first round time, or throwing out that time and trying again in the second round. However, since second round qualifying is held on a different day, sometimes under very different weather conditions, it is often a virtual impossibility for a team to improve its position through second round qualifying. The proposed change is to eliminate the option of standing on the first round time and forcing every team that fails to make the field in the first round to requalify in the second round. Naturally I have to raise some objections to any new idea, and make an alternative proposal of my own.
If NASCAR changes the rules so that the first round speeds of all non-qualifiers are discarded, will that really force them all to requalify in the second round? I don’t think it will, although I believe it will hit the teams that run in the middle of the pack very hard.
As things stand right now, nobody runs in second round qualifying unless they absolutely have to. There are typically only four practice sessions for a Winston Cup race: two before qualifying on Friday; one on Saturday morning before the support race; and “happy hour” on Saturday afternoon after the support race. Teams work on the qualifying setup on Friday, and the race setup on Saturday. These two setups typically have very little in common, so any reasonably competitive team that has a rare bad run in the first round and plenty of “provisionals” available, will forego the second round to concentrate on the race setup. The difference between starting 26th as the fastest non-first-day qualifier, and 37th as the first provisional starter, is too small to be worth sacrificing that valuable practice time. Six or seven years ago, when only the top twenty were locked in after the first round, and there were only four provisional slots available on a regular basis, more teams would run in the second round, but not anymore.
If a team near the top of the owner points has a bad qualifying run, they will almost certainly concentrate on their race setup anyway, and either take a zero in the second round or just run a lap with their race setup if NASCAR actually forces them to make the run. Unless NASCAR also amends the rules about how provisionals are charged, these teams, being in the top 25 in owners’ points, will have essentially unlimited provisionals to use. So it seems likely that the good teams (those good enough to be guaranteed a provisional) that fall below 26th in the first round, will almost automatically take a provisional slot. Consequently, it’s likely then that all seven provisionals will be effectively filled before the second round is even run, by teams in the top 15 or 20 who choose not to make a serious attempt in the second round.
From the standpoint of the bottom-end teams, things will be quite a bit better, since there will now be five or six non-provisional spots that would otherwise have been filled by the top-level teams had they been allowed to stand on their first round time. The bottom eight or ten teams’ chances of making the show on Sunday will be governed almost exclusively by their Saturday performance without any real regard for what has happened earlier in the season. In other words, a team standing 48th in owner points will have just as good a chance as a team 28th in owner points, since neither will have any real shot at a provisional.
The teams that will really suffer under the proposed rules are the ones that sit in the middle of the standings. Without any shot at a provisional, if they don’t make it in the first round, they will have to qualify well in the second round in order to make the race, but once they make the race (which they should do more often than not, since their race performance has put them higher in the standings than the bottom-end teams) they will only have happy hour in which to work on their race setups. As a result, the mid-pack teams will both miss races more frequently, and be less prepared when they successfully make the race. If the new rule is put in place, I expect to see a clear gap develop between the teams that never have to run in the second round, and those that often have to.
An Alternative Proposal
The real problem lies in the great difference between a qualifying setup and a race setup. If there was no difference, then spending the Saturday morning practice session preparing for second round qualifying wouldn’t be a handicap in the race itself. So suppose we create a rule that reduces or eliminates the difference, at least with respect to second round qualifying? As things currently stand, second round qualifying typically involves just a handful of teams, and it isn’t really much of an event from the fans’ standpoint. Under the proposed rule, second round qualifying would involve more teams, but still wouldn’t be much of an event for the spectators.
So let’s not run time trials on Saturday for the second round of qualifying. Instead, let’s have all of the teams that are non-qualified after the first round run in a “hooligan” race on Sunday morning before the main event. This race would be ten laps or ten miles, whichever is longer, and the first eleven finishers transfer to the big race. This way everybody gets to work on their race setup and nobody has to go home on Saturday. The twenty-five first round qualifiers get to skip the hooligan race, and any other non-qualified teams that are high enough in the owner points to be guaranteed a provisional may skip it too, if they don’t want to risk wrecking their primary car and don’t mind starting at the back of the pack.
With fifteen or twenty cars running in a quick sprint race, the event would actually be worth watching for many fans, and it’s likely that the television networks would be willing to show the highlights during their pre-race coverage. Even the teams that fail to make the main event would gain some degree of exposure for their sponsors.
By holding the hooligan race on Sunday, an hour or so before the real race, the non-qualifiers actually gain some advantage over the qualified teams, by experiencing the track conditions for that day, although this “advantage” is gained at the risk of wrecking or otherwise missing the show. Since it’s a pretty short sprint, and since there are eleven transfer spots, the six or eight teams that start the hooligan race up front (i.e. the teams who were 26th through 32nd or so in the first round) run a relatively low risk of being wrecked and can really treat it as an extra ten lap practice session. A team like Jeff Burton’s, who frequently qualify poorly but always race well, would probably be glad to take advantage of it, at least when they didn’t qualify way in the back, since even if they had a tire go down or a plug wire come off, they could always fall back on a provisional, and the chance to both move up a few slots on the grid and get a handle on the track before the top qualifiers would probably be worth the small risk of getting in a wreck.
I’m sure that there are objections that can be raised to this proposal, but so far I haven’t thought of any that would outweigh the benefits. Yes it’s a bit more creative than NASCAR’s usual fare, but that’s hardly a strike against it.