DO MESS WITH THE POINTS SYSTEM

If Bill France Jr. had appointed me to run the
day-to-day operation of NASCAR instead of Mike Helton, things would be a
whole lot different. For one thing, Mr. France would be undergoing
psychiatric evaluation to determine his competency, since I’m a computer
programmer with no significant experience either in racing or running a
business. However, just for grins, let’s pretend that I was running
NASCAR now, instead of Mr. Helton and Mr. France.

The very first thing that I’d change is the point
system used in the Winston Cup and Busch Grand National series. The system
that’s in use right now was created in a different period and was
intended to promote a certain set of goals that are not really much of an
issue any longer. It promotes or causes certain behaviors, both among the
competitors and the fans, that are unfortunate and detrimental to the
sport itself. A better system can and should be implemented.

The Current Point System

The current system is a rather simple progression,
and although each position in the top five carries a 5-point differential
over its successor, and positions six through ten carry a 4-point
differential, the overall progression is quite linear, as can be seen in
the chart below. As such, it over-emphasizes differences at the back end
of the field and under-emphasize differences at the front end, relative to
the perception of the fans, the media, and the competitors themselves.

For example, any reasonable fan and any serious
competitor considers either a 30^th place finish or a 40^th
place finish to be poor ones, yet the point system differentiates them by
thirty points. A thirty point difference is greater than that between 1^st
and 7^th place! Certainly the emotional difference between
winning and coming in seventh, is far greater than the difference between
finishing 30^th and 40^th. In all too many races, the
difference between finishing 30^th and 40^th hinges in
how hard the two cars managed to hit the wall, and it’s not at all
uncommon for teams to finish in those sorts of positions due to accidents
that are completely beyond their own control. On the other hand, it is
rather uncommon for a team to go from 7^th place to 1^st
on a similar basis. Perhaps two or three times each season some team will
win a race on the basis of better fuel management. These might be
considered "lucky" wins, especially if the team that does it
gets out of sequence with the rest of the leaders as a result of some
unplanned circumstance, but a certain amount of skill and knowledge is
still required to pull it off. In the vast majority of cases, the
difference between winning and finishing 7^th represents a
genuine difference in the competitive level of the two teams in that
particular race.

The only thing that one team can ethically do on
its own to effect the number of points that another team scores in a
race is to finish one position ahead of them. The best that any one team
can do in any single race is to win it and lead the most laps. Since it is
not realistically possible to prevent all of the other teams from leading
any laps at all, the winning team can only gain ten points on the second
place team through its own actions. The second place team may
actually finish without having led any laps, but that is generally not a
direct result of the winning team’s performance. Consequently, from a
purely mathematical perspective, any team that needs to gain more than ten
points per race over the remainder of the season in order to overtake the
current leader, does not have their fate in their own hands. In theory, a
team that is 300 points out of the lead after the fifth race, could
dominate and win the next 29 races in a row, and still lose the
championship.

Of course, in practice that won’t happen. However,
later in the season, this scenario becomes somewhat more realistic. For
example, with ten races remaining, a team that is 150 points out of the
lead needs to gain an average of 15 points per race to win the
championship. While winning ten in a row is probably unrealistic, a
legitimate championship contender could conceivably win five of the last
ten, never finish out of the top six, have an average finishing position
of fourth, and still lose the championship if the leader has an average
finish of seventh or better. Consequently, fans of a driver that trails
the leader by any but the smallest of margins can’t just root for their
team to do well. If they want their driver to win the championship, they
are forced to hope that the leader wrecks, breaks down, or suffers some
other misfortune that will cause him to lose a large number of points.

To state things in another way: for the teams at the
top end of the standings, almost all of the volatility under the current
system is based on negative performance. For the teams that routinely
finish in the top five or ten, there is rarely any significant change in
the standings relative to each other, as long as they all finish in the
top five or ten, regardless of which of them actually wins the race. It is
nearly impossible for a team to move up in the standings on the basis of
their own positive performance. For one team to move up in the standings,
the team ahead of them must perform poorly. When was the last time
that the points lead actually changed hands in the second half of the
season, where the team that lost the lead didn’t suffer some kind of
misfortune? When was the last time that the old points leader lost his
lead by finishing second, while the new leader won the race? It simply
never happens under the current point system.

These objective realities often negatively effect
the behavior of the point leader late in the season as well. Knowing that
they will win the championship as long as they don’t have any
particularly bad finishes, regardless of how the other teams perform, a
team with a significant lead is encouraged to become much more
conservative. It effects the way that they adjust their car’s setup
during the race. It effects their decisions about whether to take on two
tires or four during a pit stop. It effects their decisions about how long
to stretch their fuel mileage. If the point leader’s car is "just a
little bit off," so that it’s running solidly in the top ten but is
not really able challenge the race leaders, the team is highly motivated
to leave the setup alone or to make only very small adjustments, rather
than aggressively trying to improve its handling. Finishing sixth or
eighth accomplishes their primary goal of not blowing the points lead. If
they make large adjustments and go the wrong way, they risk having a
really bad finish. Even though the top teams are typically able to make
the correct adjustments and quickly recover from most such mistakes, the
rewards for improving their finish by four or five positions simply don’t
justify the risk late in the season.

The New Point System

To address these complaints, I would alter the point
system to distribute the points in a less linear fashion. Winning a race
should carry a tangible points benefit over finishing second or third,
similar to the way that the immediate monetary awards differ between the
top finishers. Poor finishes should all receive approximately the same
"penalty" regardless of whether they result from getting punted
into the wall on lap 50 or blowing up the motor on lap 200.

It wouldn’t be anything as extreme as the point
system used in Formula One, where on any given race weekend, I score
just as many championship points myself, while sitting at home, as the
bulk of the field does. There would still be some differentiation between
the positions at the bottom end of the scale, since differences in owner
points effect things like the allocation of provisional starting positions
that often don’t involve the legitimate championship contenders, but the
differentiation would be much less than is currently the case. However,
there would be a great deal more differentiation between the positions at
the top end of the scale. The point distribution, if I ran NASCAR, would
be as shown in the table below.

This distribution actually has much in common with
the current point system. The race winner still gets 175 points; the last
place finisher still gets significantly more points than those who don’t
qualify for the race; and the point differences between positions 4
through 15 are actually identical. The idea of decreasing the difference
at every fifth position is simply extended so that the gap goes down to
two points for positions 16 through 20, and down to one point for all the
positions thereafter. Within the top three however, there is a significant
alteration: the gap doubles with every position. Third is ten points
better than fourth; second is twenty points better than third; and first
is forty points better than second!

The changes at the top end of the scale are intended
to both motivate the leading teams to continue aggressively competing for
race victories throughout the entire season, and to allow a team trailing
the leader to close the gap directly through their own performance,
without having to rely upon some misfortune befalling the teams ahead. The
changes in the middle and bottom end are intended to lessen the degree to
which "luck" influences the standings by reducing the role of
circumstance in determining the damage done by a single poor performance.
A bad finish is a bad finish, regardless of whether it’s a 30^th
or a 40^th place finish.

Some History

Of course, it’s easy for me to say that this scale
would improve the situation, but considerably more difficult to prove it
in any sense. Calculating how various teams would have fared under this
system over the past few complete seasons would not prove anything at all,
since one of the system’s express purposes is to alter the way that
teams are motivated to perform. Even in the early part of the season,
significantly raising the value of the top few spots is likely to lead
some teams to adopt more aggressive tire and fuel strategies in certain
situations. Nevertheless, it may be enlightening to consider how the
standings would be effected by this proposed system in the middle stages
of a season, and what competitive opportunities arise from those effects.

The 1997 season offered a prime example of the
leading team being forced into a conservative mode by the current point
system. In the first twenty-five races, Jeff Gordon and the 24 team won
ten times, finished in the top three fifteen times, never finished
out of the top five without also finishing out of the top twenty, and
built a 139 point lead over Mark Martin and the 6 team, and a 188 point
lead over Dale Jarrett and the 88 team. Over the final seven races of
1997, Gordon did not finish among the top three at all, and finished
between 6^th and 20^th on three occasions. Over that
same stretch, the 88 team won twice, finished second twice, finished ahead
of the 24 team six times, but still couldn’t overcome the deficit.

It certainly appears that over the last seven races
of the 1997 season, fans of Jeff Gordon did not get to see their team
perform up to its full potential because the 24 team had to "focus on
the Big Picture", which meant avoiding disastrous finishes at all
costs, including not aggressively pursuing race victories. Fans of Dale
Jarrett and the 88 team got to see a pretty dominant performance over the
tail end of the season, but had to hope for Gordon to blow up or wreck,
since even seven straight wins wouldn’t be sufficient as long as the 24
team’s average finish remained 6^th or better.

Had the proposed point system been used that year,
the 24 team’s lead would have been even more commanding following the
twenty-fifth race, at least numerically. Jeff Gordon would have been
leading Dale Jarrett by 453 points, and Mark Martin by 591 points.
Obviously winning ten races provides a substantial advantage over winning
five or two at that point. Gordon’s team could lose 64 points per race
to Jarrett’s team, and 84 points per race to Martin’s, and still win
the championship. However, because of the changed distribution, they would
have needed to have an average finish of 4^th or better to
prevent being overtaken by Jarrett if he won seven straight. Thus, even
thought the 24 team’s numerical advantage in the standings would have
been greater under this new system, they would have been systematically
encouraged to continue their aggressive performance over the remainder of
the season.

The 1998 season did not follow the same pattern of
course. The 24 team won three of the last seven races, and only finished
out of the top five on one occasion during that stretch, so there is
little reason to complain about the outcome. However, it remains the case
that during the latter half of the ’98 season, fans of Mark Martin and
Dale Jarrett were forced to hope for Gordon to crash or break down, since
there was nothing their teams could do on their own to overcome his lead.

The 1996 season also did not follow the pattern of
mediocre performances by the Champion in the last few races. Terry Labonte’s
team actually performed better over the last six races, winning one and
finishing among the top three sixty-seven percent of the time, than they
did over the first twenty-five, where they won once and finished in the
top three forty percent of the time. But one can seriously question
whether a team with two wins and fourteen top three finishes should really
win the championship over a team with ten wins and seventeen top three
finishes. Had this new point system been in use that year, Labonte and the
5 team would have needed a few more victories to hold off both the 24 and
88 teams. In fact, without a few more wins, Jeff Gordon and the 24 team
would have passed them in the points after the third race. But the battle
for second would have been close and spirited.

The 1995 season did fit the same pattern as the 1997
season. In the first twenty-five races, Jeff Gordon and the 24 team won
seven times, and finished in the top three fifteen times. Only six times
over that period did they finish out of the top three without also
finishing out of the top twenty. Over the last six races though, they
finished in the top three only once, and finished between 4^th
and 20^th on three occasions. Under the current point system,
Dale Earnhardt trailed by 309 points after the twenty-fifth race and
needed to gain 52 points per race to take the championship, so Jeff Gordon
only needed an average finish of 10^th or better to
mathematically eliminate Earnhardt. As was the case for the ’97 season,
had the proposed point system been in use in ’95, the 24 team’s lead
after the twenty-fifth race would have been considerably larger – 472
points – but because of the altered distribution, they would have needed
an average finish of 4^th to mathematically eliminate the 3
team. In the twenty-sixth race that year, Earnhardt would have cut 89
points off the lead when he won, nearly a fifth of his deficit, even
though Gordon finished 7^th. So it would seem that the 24 team’s
motivation to run conservatively would have been lessened somewhat.

Now of course Dale Earnhardt and the 3 team did not
win the last six straight races in ’95, and had the proposed system been
in use, the 24 team would have actually locked up the championship in
Phoenix if they performed in exactly the same way that they did in
reality. Would this have made the last few races of the season more
entertaining or less? I can’t say for sure, but the 24 team might have
at least put forth a more serious effort in the closer at Atlanta.

Bonus Points

The last problem with the current point system that
I feel needs correcting is the allocation of bonus points. Under the
current system, any team that leads a lap, receives five bonus points. At
the end of the race, the team that has lead the most laps receives another
five bonus points. The rationale for this is to encourage the teams to
aggressively compete for the lead all through the race, rather than to
simply remain within sight of the leader and not actually fighting for the
lead until the last fifty laps or so. Unfortunately this makes no
distinction between the various ways in which one can lead a lap.

A team that takes the lead by passing the previous
leader "in anger" – that is, under green, while both cars are
running at their full speed – should probably receive some kind of
bonus. But when the last car on the lead lap stays out when the rest of
the lead lap cars pit under caution, does that team really deserve five
extra points? This behavior isn’t aggressive in any sense. They’re not
even trying to gain track position by cranking out a good pitstop!

Instead of awarding five bonus points for leading
any lap, I would award one point per lap led, up to a maximum of
five. Since NASCAR is already counting the number of laps led in order to
determine who led the most, there is no extra burden for the people
scoring the race. But now the reward for just leading a little bit is
substantially reduced. Why should a team that leads only one lap get the
same bonus as a team that leads forty?

Under this allocation of bonus points, it is still
possible to gain all five bonus points by stretching your fuel mileage,
but you either have to stretch it five laps beyond what the faster cars
can manage, or stretch it over a period of more than one green-flag
pitstop. The incentive to be fuel efficient is still there, but the
incentive to be fast becomes relatively greater. You can’t just stretch
it one extra lap, one time, and get the full five point bonus.

I’d leave the extra five points for leading the
most laps as it currently stands. Although the difference between the most
and second most is occasionally pretty small, I can’t think of any way
that one could lead the most laps without actually having a fast car and
using it aggressively. With this bonus still in place and five laps
required to collect the full lap leader bonus, we might also see less of
this stuff where the leader’s team makes a deal with the second place
team to allow the second place car to take the lead for a lap in return
for not aggressively fighting the first car for the lead. These deals are
the antithesis of aggressive competition, and so requiring the original
leader to give it up for five laps ought to help discourage them, at least
between drivers for different teams.

In Conclusion …

Bill France probably isn’t going to hand me the
keys to the NASCAR juggernaut any time soon, but if he did, the fans would
get a better show. The changes that I would make to the point system would
bring the championship point distribution more into line with the fan’s
perception of the value of a given race performance. Based on the monetary
awards, and based on the amount of press coverage given to the various
finishers, it seems that the differences between 1^st, 2^nd,
and 3^rd place are perceived to be significantly greater than
the differences between positions further back in the field. The current
system’s 5-point, 4-point, and 3-point differentials don’t sufficiently
reflect that perception. This new, less linear system would at least come
a whole lot closer.

These changes would also put a little more control
of the "fate" of the leading teams into the hands of those
teams. Under the new system, a team could reasonably hope to take
the points lead from their competitors through their own performance,
rather than simply hoping to inherit the lead when the teams ahead
of them have enough bad days. This in turn would promote more aggressive
competition between the top teams, those with a legitimate shot at winning
the championship, especially over the last few races of the season. All of
this is aimed at raising the interest and excitement for the fans in the
late stages of the season in somewhat the same way that playoffs and
championship games do for fans of the "stick and ball" sports.