Dropping the Hammer: The Outlier Champion; Dale Earnhardt Inc.’s Last Ride

OK, I guess I’m going to be that guy.

I do not hate the playoffs.

And I am more or less unbothered that Joey Logano — who only won once in the regular season after saving an ungodly amount of fuel at Nashvillle Superspeedway — went on to win his third career NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday (Nov. 10).

Good for him.

He’s done what others before him did: got hot — or maybe humid? — at the right time.

He competed under the same rules as everyone else. He did what he needed to when it counted the most.

The other playoff contenders didn’t.

The near hysteria over Logano even being in the Championship 4 — which NASCAR President Steve Phelps went out of his way to defend during his State of the Sport address on Friday (Nov. 8) — has boggled my mind.

In 11 years of the elimination format, we finally got a weird champion!

I mean, we were one restart away from getting one in the very first year of this format.

Remember Ryan Newman somehow, someway making it to the Championship 4 in 2014 despite not having won a *single* race all season?

Wouldn’t that have been awesome?

It took awhile, but Matt Crafton finally broke that glass ceiling in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2019. He did that with zero wins and only seven top fives.

An outlier like Logano’s championship was bound to happen.

That’s what happens when NASCAR has a “win-and-you’re-in” format and also 16 possible slots to account for.

Logano got the championship through skill (winning at Atlanta Motor Speedway), another team’s mistake (Alex Bowman‘s DQ at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL), strategy (winning at Las Vegas Motor Speedway) and beating the other guys straight up at Phoenix Raceway.

It was a combination of a fluke and almost every possible way you can win a race.

And last I checked, I thought underdogs were supposed to be celebrated?

Anyway, NASCAR might deliver something to everyone who thinks the current format is an abomination to mankind (to the person on X, formerly Twitter, who said Logano winning was worse than Dale Earnhardt Sr. dying … what the hell?).

🤔 "Is that the best way to do it?" #NASCAR's Elton Sawyer says the sanctioning body is willing to look at the playoff format during the offseason.

More ➡️ https://t.co/MKhd9eLXG8 pic.twitter.com/KVcCEkLcTX

— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90) (@SiriusXMNASCAR) November 12, 2024

“We get it, we understand it,” Elton Sawyer said Tuesday (Nov. 12) on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “As we’ve said, and Steve O’Donnell and Steve Phelps mentioned it in the State of The Sport press conference on Saturday, we’re going to have playoffs, we’re going to have a playoff format. But what we will do is we will take input from our fans, our competitors and our industry stakeholders this offseason, and if there is a way to tweak it, make it better, we will do that.”

If NASCAR “tweaks” anything, I have a few thoughts.

Re-institute the requirement that a driver must be above a certain place in the point standings to be playoff elgible. NASCAR removed it last year and shouldn’t have.

Don’t make the final round of the playoffs one race. It should be the same length as the previous rounds or at least two races.

Really, anything that would potentially keep Phoenix Raceway from solely deciding the championship would make me happy.

End of an Era

Since things are currently up in the air about whether 23XI Racing will even compete in the Daytona 500 next year, I’m going to write this section as if Martin Truex Jr. won’t be in the race.

Sunday was bittersweet for this fan of the race team formally known as Dale Earnhardt Inc.

When Truex took the checkered flag — driving a DEI throwback scheme to his first start — it marked the last time a driver who raced under the DEI banner competed in a Cup race.

DEI’s best days were behind it when Truex joined the team full time in 2006, but it was still the team that Dale Earnhardt built.

If the organization hadn’t been run into the ground by Theresa Earnhardt, Truex’s Cup career could have even better than it was.

Which is saying something, because Truex wound up having a great career.

But really, I just miss DEI. But I really miss being a kid.

And Truex riding off into the Phoenix sunset is just another reminder I’m not one anymore.