NASCAR’s top brass has a message for fans and critics questioning their new championship format: the numbers don’t lie. As the series reverts to a Chase-style system, one executive is armed with what he calls ‘proof’ that this is the right call, directly addressing years of debate.

The change marks a return to the ‘Chase’ format, which the premier stock car series used from 2004 to 2013. As the stock car governing body returned to the Chase format, the NASCAR Vice President of the competition delivered a strong verdict on the championship, and changed NASCAR’s stance when it comes to fans.

NASCAR returned with the old format and changed the fans’ perspective

Ben Kennedy, the NASCAR executive vice president, recently shared everything about the format change in the Inside The Race podcast. While speaking about it, Kennedy, who also oversees the Venue and Racing Innovations side, revealed how they looked at “different opinions, different perspectives to conclude.

While making the decision, they also took cognizance of the need for consistency and made points a really important part of the season. This means that the drivers will no longer use the “win-and-you-rein” system to fight for the championship.

Along with this, NASCAR also made sure they crowned the champion in the final race, which is at Homestead-Miami Speedway this season. Through this, NASCAR will be able to keep the fans on their heels as the champion will be revealed at the very last race of the season.

“One of my first questions as we came up with is, where we’re gonna crown our champion, we talked about this for a while,” Kennedy said in the podcast. “Do you crown it before you get to Homestead? Or you’re crowning your champion at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Thankfully, as we ran all our studies, this time we’re all crowning our champion at Homestead.”

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced the change in its format, and according to the new (something which they used earlier) format, there will be no elimination. There will be 26 regular-season races, and the Top 10 drivers with the most points will qualify for the next round.

In the end, the driver with the most points in the next and final 10 races will win the championship. This contrasts starkly with the playoff format earlier, where qualified drivers faced elimination after three races if they failed to win a single race. This particular format, the fans disliked in general, and wanted a change.

NASCAR kept fans in mind while changing format

While NASCAR released the Chase format, it also addressed fans’ sentiments this time.  When asked about how important fans were behind returning to the Chase format, this is what the NASCAR VP had to say:

“[Fans are] Incredibly important to us. Those are probably some of our biggest stakeholders as we make a decision… Our fans are incredibly important to us as well, and as Steve said earlier, we’re not gonna make everyone happy. If you look at the spectrum, there are people on all sides of the spectrum, but if you take what is most important to everyone, you put them in together, and you end up with a format like this.”

Over the years, fans and experts have criticised the playoff system that existed earlier. They believed that the playoff system was heavily based on luck and did not reflect the true talent and performance of a driver.

If an example is taken of a driver who won five races in the regular season, he might not enter the top eight or top four if he fails to win any more races under the playoff system. Whereas, a driver with just a win in the regular season and a win in the playoffs might end up being a champion. All in all, fans objected to this, and NASCAR respected their voice.