In all the sporting news that really matters, now that the New York Jets continued to assert themselves in the Jets-iest kinds of ways, the focus can move to Austin, Texas, where the No. 3-ranked University of Georgia visits No. 1 University of Texas in another battle royale for football supremacy. The Dawgs look to overcome their loss to Alabama and regain pole position in the race for the SEC Championship … or is it the playoffs? Which matters more at this point?
What we do know is that pole position in Austin will be a major thing, as Formula 1 returns to the track after a three-week break and then has five more races remaining in the season. McLaren has changed the tenor of the season by capitalizing on Red Bull’s miscues and less-than-dominant performance to take over the lead in the constructors championship. Due to his blistering of the field in the first half of the season, Max Verstappen holds a commanding lead over Lando Norris in the drivers standings, 331-279.
A little under 1,300 miles away, in the quaint town of Las Vegas, Nev., a different racing endeavor — NASCAR — will be doing its best to take away viewers from the UGA-UT game on Saturday and the F1 spectacle on Sunday. It’s not quite the close-quarters, on-track action that NASCAR promotes, but it is nonetheless an important battle.
One of the things that can be gleaned from the two series racing so close together is that it offers a hard-to-avoid look at how champions are decided. Let’s get creative for a minute here.
In F1, if we introduce the playoff format, the series would stand at either the Round of 8 or the Championship 4, depending on how the season is constructed, but since this exercise is silliness, we’ll go with eight. That would mean that Red Bull driver Sergio Perez, who has offered evidence at nearly every stop that he is not worth the two-year contract he signed earlier in the season, is still in the running for the championship. Say what? To give an idea, he has accumulated less than half of Verstappen’s points, sitting at 144. He should be in the running for the championship as much as Florida needs another hurricane.
But in this scenario, Oscar Piastri, who has driven lights-out since the summer break, would also be in contention. Though Norris has been sold as the next champion, the statistics show that Piastri might be the one in line and the bigger talent. Now, maybe that would be worth hoping for because he currently sits on 237 points, nearly four race wins behind Verstappen.
Piastri is, then, the prime example of what it looks like to be the champion over a full season rather than a half. This notion shifts the focus to NASCAR and what things look like as it enters its final four races, with eight drivers still in contention.
To start, using NASCAR’s Latford points system that was used before the introduction of the playoffs in 2004, Tyler Reddick is still leading the way. He’s followed by Chase Elliott, Christopher Bell, William Byron, and then, finally Kyle Larson.
- Tyler Reddick 4284
- Chase Elliott 4272
- Christopher Bell 4216
- William Byron 4106
- Kyle Larson 4094
- Chris Buescher 4011
- Ross Chastain 3952
- Brad Keselowski 3949
Three names, already knocked out of the playoffs, move into better positions but with no real shot of winning the championship. In fact, with four races to go, only three drivers in the field have any chance of winning the 2024 Cup title.
The contrasts in deciding the titles are striking, and in some ways, F1 could enjoy a bit of an alteration to its format, but that has more to do with how frequently drivers run away with the championship. Verstappen has clinched the title heading to Austin before, just as Lewis Hamilton has, and that’s one of the byproducts of a sport where innovation can lead to a runaway winner.
In NASCAR, the windows are tighter and the field closer, so the sport has yet to see someone cruise through things, except maybe Jimmie Johnson in the first iteration of the playoffs since the sport changed its championship format. What is striking is that Reddick, who just eked into the Round of 8, would still be cruising; and the current points leader, Larson, would, realistically, be out of the running.
The challenges of keeping a racing series entertaining at the end of an absurdly long season are monumental. The playoffs continue to be an easy target for everything that is wrong with NASCAR, what is right for college football and a non-issue for F1. The question that centers the discussion is always the same: is the goal to reward a season’s long effort, or a team’s ability to come through when it mattered?
As a writer and editor, Ava anchors the Formula 1 coverage for the site, while working through many of its biggest columns. Ava earned a Masters in Sports Studies at UGA and a PhD in American Studies from UH-Mānoa. Her dissertation Chased Women, NASCAR Dads, and Southern Inhospitality: How NASCAR Exports The South is in the process of becoming a book.