That means you, Sprint Cup drivers. It’s too early in the season to start thinning the herd before a race is 40 minutes old.
A 14-car pileup on Lap 67 of Sunday’s Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix? Reid Spencer wants to know what happened there. (AP Photo) A wreck on Lap 29 of the season-opening Daytona 500 collected 17 cars. Admittedly, that was Daytona, where the “big one” is commonplace. But a 14-car pileup on Lap 67 of Sunday’s Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix? Explain that one.
Yes, it was right after a restart, when the opportunity to improve position is greatest. And, yes, it was triggered by hard racing and slight contact between Matt Kenseth and Brian Vickers. The right side of Kenseth’s Ford touched the left side of Vickers’ Toyota, cutting the left rear tire.
Vickers turned sideways into the wall, and all hell broke loose behind him.
Clint Bowyer was an innocent victim of the wreck. As he watched his crew repair his battered Chevrolet, Bowyer used the words “disgusting” and “embarrassing” to describe the quality of racing.
“They were driving like it was the last lap,” Bowyer said. “Man, if we keep this up, we’ll only have about four cars at the end of all these races. Everybody was checked-up all over the place and running into the back of us, and we got crashed.
“It’s just stupid. To be racing this hard this early in a race—we’re all smarter than this.”
Jeff Burton, Bowyer’s teammate, was another casualty. A blown engine at Daytona had relegated Burton to a 36th-place finish in the 500. At Phoenix, he needed to make up ground. Instead he finished the day nursing his damaged car around the track to a 26th-place finish, 36 laps down.
“Certainly, if people are wrecking, it’s too aggressive,” Burton said. There’s no question about that. I can’t control other people. I can only control us.”
Does a mistaken assumption, however, contribute to the apparent impatience on the racetrack? Ever since NASCAR introduced its new points system during the offseason, the consensus has been that a devastating finish under the new system—such as Kevin Harvick’s 42nd-place result at Daytona—will be far more difficult to overcome than it would have been under the old scoring format.
The media have bought into that assertion, and so have the drivers. And maybe that’s why drivers were racing so hard so early at Phoenix, particularly those who felt they needed to improve on a lackluster finish at Daytona.
The argument most often used to convince us that a rotten finish under the new system is worse than it would have been under the old one involves percentages of last-place points relative to first-place points. One as a percentage of 43, the argument goes, is much smaller than 34 (what last place earned under the old system) as a percentage of 185 (what first place earned under the old system).
That’s quite true. It’s also quite irrelevant. What matters is the spread between first and last, and, in reality, it was wider in relative terms under the old system.
Think Celsius and Fahrenheit. On the Celsius scale, water freezes at zero degrees and boils at 100. On the Fahrenheit scale, water freezes at 32 degrees and boils at 212.
One degree Celsius is roughly 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Obviously, 34 is a bigger percentage of 212 than one is of 100. But that doesn’t make it any warmer or colder.
Case in point: Harvick finished 42nd at Daytona and fourth at Phoenix. After two races under the new scoring system, he’s 22nd in points.
In 2002, on the way to his first championship, Tony Stewart finished 43rd in the Daytona 500 and fourth at Rockingham in the second race of the season. You can guess where he stood in points after those two races. That’s right—22nd.
The kicker is that, relatively speaking, Harvick is about as far out of first and 10th places today as Stewart was nine years ago.
So calm down, boys. There’s no reason to race like there’s no tomorrow.
Do the math.
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