The 76th season of the NASCAR Cup Series will officially come to an end on Sunday afternoon at Phoenix Raceway in Avondale, Ariz., with the running of the 312-mile Cup Series Championship. The field will be full, but only four drivers will be competing for the title, having advanced through NASCAR's quirky version of the playoffs, which began nine races ago, on Sept. 8 in Atlanta. At Phoenix on Sunday, the driver with the best finish will win it all. It's racing's one-and-done, pedal-to-the-metal version of the Final Four. Talk about pressure.
A postseason in NASCAR is nothing new, of course. The series stopped crowning champions based solely on their end-of-season point totals 20 years ago, with Kurt Busch winning the inaugural Chase for the Cup in 2004. The playoff format has gone through several changes of varying significance since then, enduring but never really thriving. It's little secret in the sport that the Chase has failed to capture the hearts of racing fans-conventional wisdom holds that most would be just fine deciding championships the old-fashioned way. But more on that in a moment. For now, here's a rundown of five of NASCAR's top story lines for Sunday and beyond.
4. The heartbreak of Kyle Larson
By almost any measure, the 31-year-old Californian was the best driver in Cup this season. He won a series-best six races, taking checkered flags on speedways (Charlotte, Kansas, Las Vegas) and road courses (Sonoma), as well as at Bristol and Indy, two of the most storied venues in the sport. He also finished in the top 10 in 17 of his 34 starts, and topped all drivers with 1,686 laps led. From beginning to end, he was the driver to beat almost every week.
But he was shut out of NASCAR's Championship 4 because of a series of self-inflicted wounds in the last round of the Chase. At Las Vegas on Oct. 20, he suffered pit-stop miscues, and at Homestead the next week, the Hendrick Motorsports driver endured a flat tire and a collision with the wall in Turn 2. None of the bobbles were catastrophic, but they helped keep him outside the top 10 in both races. In Martinsville last week, he couldn't find the speed to finish any better than third. "We had a lot of bonus points, we had 20 more than the next guy," Larson said after Martinsville. "We just had two unfortunate races. I think the wins do benefit you a lot. I don't want to say there's anything wrong with the format. You just can't have two bad races in the round of 8."
5. Dissatisfaction with the Chase format
When NASCAR created the Chase back before the 2004 season, it was the fastest-growing sport in the U.S., a juggernaut that was supposed to someday compete with pro football on Sundays. But the Cup series' postseason has never been able to draw eyeballs away from the NFL. Television ratings for NASCAR have been declining for 10 years, and last season's championship race averaged just three million viewers. (The average NFL regular-season game in 2023, for comparison, drew 17.9 million viewers.)
The format has failed to catch on, but NASCAR has also failed to settle on a Chase that it can live with. First it was expanded to 12 drivers from 10, and then grew to 16 in 2014. That was when NASCAR broke the season's final 10 into four rounds, with a winner-take-all race involving four finalists-the framework that still exists today, though stage points were added to the mix in 2017 in an attempt to reduce the volatility that the format engendered.
But there are still ways to game the system, and the shenanigans that marred the end of last week's race at Martinsville exposed that fact. With Byron on the verge of falling out of the Championship 4, two other Chevrolet drivers who were not in the Chase-Ross Chastain and Auston Dillon-ran interference for him. Byron was further assisted when NASCAR disqualified a car from the championship that had made an illegal move to get into qualifying position. Even some of the drivers seem fed up.
With a format that has changed so many times, there shouldn't be too much drama in another round of tweaks. Or, better yet, NASCAR could return its title fight to a season-long points affair. That's still how Formula 1 and IndyCar do it. No shame in trying to get it right.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Five Story Lines to Watch Ahead of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Championship.