The Thrills of the Regular Season & the Repetition of the Playoffs

Well folks, here we are. After a seven-month road trip from Daytona Beach, Fla., to Darlington, S.C. — by way of Sonoma, Calif., Loudon, N.H. and 18 other scenic stops — this weekend we’ll whittle the field down from 34 to 16 at the start of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series playoffs. But first, I’d be remiss if we didn’t take a moment to reflect on what is, in my mind, the most memorable regular season in NASCAR’s playoff era. I’ll be honest: I don’t think the playoffs are going to top it.

These 26 racing weeks saw former series champions Chase Elliott and Brad Keselowski snap years-long winless streaks. Those 26 racing weeks saw Alex Bowman’s emotional drought-breaking win on the Chicago street course, battling treacherous conditions, Tyler Reddick and … Joey Hand.

Kyle Larson made a Faustian bargain to start a rain-delayed Indianapolis 500 at the expense of making the flight down to Charlotte Motor Speedway for the Coca-Cola 600 — a race, it turns out, that had he started, would have sealed him the regular-season title come September. He did, however, claim victory in the closest-ever finish in the top division of stock car racing, pipping Chris Buescher to the line at Kansas Speedway by a single thousandth of a second.

Months later, that devastatingly close loss came back to bite Buescher, as he’d be backed into a down-to-the-wire three-way dogfight for the final playoff spot among three drivers who put up Round of 12 runs last season: himself, Ross Chastain and Bubba Wallace — all three of whom had their hearts broken by a come-from-nowhere Chase Briscoe in the Southern 500. Briscoe snapped a winless streak that stretched to 2022 to claim his second career victory, and vault from an anonymous mid-20s points position into the postseason. 

If I had a nickel for every time that happened in 2024, I’d have three nickels. That isn’t a lot, but … strange that it happened three times. Daniel Suarez won Atlanta Motor Speedway by a nose, (in much the same way a fictional racer once won by a tongue) and Austin Cindric found himself in the catbird seat when his teammate Ryan Blaney faltered on the last lap at World Wide Technology Raceway.

The year that saw the 30th-place cutoff rule for playoff eligibility rescinded saw not one but two drivers outside the top 30 in points win on hot August nights. Harrison Burton, with a little help from Parker Retzlaff, scored an unlikely first career victory (the 100th for historic Wood Brothers Racing), and Austin Dillon‘s bowling-ball antics in the final corner at Richmond Raceway earned himself an unprecedented penalty, keeping the victory, but losing postseason eligibility for “actions detrimental to stock car racing.”

And don’t forget how the year started, with NASCAR’s equally unprecedented move to bring the non-points Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum forward a day to avoid a torrential storm that would go on to flood Los Angeles, an announcement that made one Frontstretch writer set what has to be a new course record for the (unsanctioned) Griffith-Park-to-Coliseum tarmac rally. This year’s playoffs have a lot to live up to.

And I don’t think they will — because fundamentally, I don’t think they can. Quick, name the most memorable championship battle of the playoff era!

I’m betting your mind jumped first to 2014, the inaugural year of the winner-take-all elimination format. Mine certainly does. I can still recap, nearly blow-by-blow, the 2014 Cup Series postseason (as you can imagine, I’m a lot of fun at parties).

But after a decade, have the elimination playoffs started to feel same to anyone else? The Round of 16 clears out the also-rans and lets the big boys bank a few extra points for later. A serious contender or two is eliminated due to misfortune in the Round of 12. Three drivers win Round of 8 races to punch their tickets to the Championship 4, and are joined by the driver we all considered a lock already. And then, a late yellow flag at Phoenix Raceway sets up pit stops that determine the champion.

To misquote Syndrome of The Incredibles, when every moment is a Game 7 moment, none of them are. 

The human brain craves novelty, and when every year, basically the same races have basically the same stakes for basically the same drivers, it starts to get boring, no matter how many times it comes down to the last few points at the cut line.

I think of it like Nicole Kidman’s infinitely memeable AMC Theatres spot. “We go somewhere we’ve never gone before,” she says, over a shot of the gates to the park opening in Jurassic World. We’d been there before, Nicole!

In Jurassic World, genetic engineering theme park company InGen has an unprecedented problem: they brought dinosaurs back from extinction and built a theme park around them. They were able to show audiences around the world the most incredible things they’d ever seen. And after a while, people stopped caring. They’d seen dinosaurs before. After all, the human brain craves novelty.

And while Colin Trevorrow’s movie uses that fact to make a point about the film industry’s obsession with ever-raising stakes within infinitely recycled intellectual property, it’s the same problem that faces NASCAR with its championship format.

Make no mistake, the current stage points/playoff points/regular points/win-and-you’re-in format is like Jurassic World‘s Indominus Rex, an ungodly hybrid of everything that common sense and market research say that people liked about the creatures that came before. Nevertheless, it somehow feels less special than those organic creations from 20 years ago.

But I can’t go all curmudgeonly about it. It’s not so easy as simply throwing out the playoffs. Here’s the ‘gotcha’: would the story of these first 26 races have been so good – so memorable – if Buescher, Wallace and Chastain had been fighting over a simple 11th place in points?

Even as a ride-or-die hater of so-called gimmicks, this extremely memorable regular season (three winners in the last four races from below the cut line!) wouldn’t have been so compelling if it weren’t for the specter of elimination hanging over Darlington.

What the playoffs have done – particularly the 16-driver version, is give fans a compelling narrative to latch onto for the middle part of the field. It’s the existential make-or-break underdog stories in a sport dominated by those Larsons, Denny Hamlins and Joey Loganos whose rides and future Hall of Fame credentials are ironclad.

And then, every time that cut line rears its ugly head, wouldn’t you know it, we pair some win-and-you’re-in chaos with some old-school points racing and some new-school innovation. Would Chastain have Hail Melon-ed his way around Martinsville Speedway’s outside wall had he not needed a couple more points for the transfer spot in 2022?

As reluctantly as I may admit it, elimination works as a device to create compelling motorsports narratives. But it’s up to NASCAR to stop those narratives from being the same every year.

The sanctioning body has been in this situation before. In 2013, the sanctioning body had a decade-old postseason format getting a little long in the tooth – and even more predictable, given that Jimmie Johnson had managed to win 60 percent of the titles under it. So, NASCAR changed it and gave fans one of the best, and certainly most memorable, years in the sport’s recent history.

But let me be real. We’re wearing rose-colored glasses for 2014, and 2004 before it, because those were the years the championship format was new. I think it’s time for another new one – and hopefully, this one is less of a genetically-engineered monstrosity. To quote another great movie (correctly, for once):

“A little revolution every now and then is a good thing, don’t you think?”