5 Points to Ponder: Should We Finally Be Concerned About the Charter Situation?

1. Ryan Blaney Is Even Better This Season

Repeating as the champion in any sport that has a full-season championship is hard. Even when a team is clearly superior to the rest of the field, so much can change from year to year that climbing the mountain all over again becomes a daunting task.

In stock car racing, a team sport masquerading as an individual pursuit, that’s proven to be even more apt. No driver has won consecutive NASCAR Cup Series championships in more than a decade when Jimmie Johnson was finishing up his run of five straight titles, a feat that only grows more incredible with the passage of time.

Despite that very significant caveat, there’s now little doubt that Ryan Blaney looks to be in the type of form to make a real challenge for a second straight Cup Series crown. Except for a brief three-week swoon that ran from Darlington Raceway to World Wide Technology Raceway, Blaney has equaled or outperformed his 2023 campaign in pretty much every way through 21 races:

• Two wins to one, with an almost certain third slipping away at Gateway when he ran out of gas with one to go.
• Ten top 10s, the same as he had at this point last season.
• Six top fives to four.

Blaney and the No. 12 team seem confident but not cocky, and with the Ford camp shaking off its general malaise from the start of the season, it’s not hard to see why. A lot will have to go right to even be in position for a back-to-back charge this fall, but there’s definitely reason to believe that the current champ has a chance to maintain that status into 2025.

2. Whatever Happened to Ross Chastain?

Ross Chastain has history on his side. It’s been very hard for someone in the final spot in the Cup Series playoff field to lose it on points (losing it to someone below them winning is an entirely separate issue) with only a few races left in the regular season.

That’s good for the Melon Man because nothing else is going his way at the moment. The last three races have included Chastain’s two worst finishes of 2024, including a season-worst 36th at Pocono Raceway.

It didn’t look like it would be this kind of campaign for Chastain and the No. 1 bunch, who kicked things off with four top 10s in the first six races. Since then? They’ve managed just three more, only one top five and zero wins.

You’d expect that last stat to change since Chastain won two races in each of the previous two seasons. If it doesn’t, however, a 27-point cushion might not be sufficient — especially since the driver chasing him, Bubba Wallace, has shown he can come up big with the regular season winding down.

All of which is to say that while the Hail Melon move is now against the rules, Chastain might want to think up something similarly innovative as he may need it to avoid missing the postseason.

3. Is This the Perfect Time to Panic About the Lack of a Charter Deal?

(h/t Woody from Toy Story)

Among the group of drivers unafraid to express negative opinions about NASCAR, Denny Hamlin is either at or right near the top. He also knows his stuff, having been around the sport for years and doubling as a driver and team owner.

So when Hamlin says teams are getting nervous about the fact that no charter deal has been reached for next year, he’s worth hearing out.

Prior to Pocono, Hamlin gave his thoughts on the charter drama to Kenny Wallace, and true to form, he didn’t hold back. Among his most thought-provoking points was his explanation of how race teams and NASCAR end up competing for the same sponsors instead of all sharing the benefits like in most sports leagues.

But he came out even stronger by suggesting that NASCAR was negotiating in bad faith.

“It’s been every proposal they’ve sent back to us is worse than the previous,” Hamlin said to Wallace. “That is factual, it keeps getting worse. So, when you ask me where are we at today, we are worse off than we were two years ago. And we are eight months away from the Daytona 500 and there not being any charters.”

He followed that with a nightmare scenario: that if there’s no new charter deal, drivers and teams “will pick and choose what the best paying races are,” not even bothering to show up for other races.

NASCAR obviously doesn’t see that as a likelihood. For fans, it’s scary enough that yes, panic might soon be the appropriate response.

4. The Regular Season Championship Race Actually Looks … Interesting?

The Cup Series regular-season championship isn’t really something that seems to move the needle with fans, try as it might for NASCAR to make it that way. Nonetheless, it provides real benefits to the winner, even if it didn’t help Martin Truex Jr. too much in 2023.

So it’s pretty cool that this year’s regular season champion might not be determined until the very end. Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Tyler Reddick and Hamlin are all within 20 points of each other with five races left before the playoffs.

Who has the edge? It’s hard to say. Reddick has the most top 10s, while Elliott has zero DNFs, both good signs of consistency. Larson and Hamlin have led many more laps than those two, though, running up front more frequently.

If it actually comes down to the regular season finale, you have to like Hamlin’s chances, as he has a hard-to-believe average finish of 8.3 at The Track Too Tough to Tame. However it pans out, this is one faux championship actually worth watching over the next few weeks.

5. NASCAR, Cars Will Never Not Be Fun

From the purely fun side of the sport comes today’s news that NASCAR and Disney are teaming up for new Cars toys that include several die-cast cars/characters based on Cup Series drivers. Along with Blaney and Wallace, who had voice cameos in Cars 3, there are new ones designed after Joey Logano, William Byron and Austin Dillon.

The Cars films are routinely rated among the lowest in the Pixar library, but they were all fun and the NASCAR ties were enjoyable. Even if Disney never makes another movie in the series (and it probably won’t), the franchise lives on in various ways through theme park attractions and merchandise.

Keeping a NASCAR connection only makes sense, and even though my kids are long past the age where they clamored for Cars die-casts, I’ll be looking for these when they arrive at Walmart.