Submitted by NASCAR Ranting and Raving Blog
I was going to go on with Part 2 of my 3 part series tonight, but I’m going to stay with Part 1 instead. I got an interesting reply from my friend Marc over at Full Throttle to what I wrote yesterday. One thing I like about Marc is that he likes to Play Devil’s Advocate every now and then just to stir up the pot a bit, so I’ll play along because I enjoy it too.
Marc wrote:
“Don’t take this as a slam but frankly I’m tired of hearing, reading this line of thought. Based on a study done by the Charlotte Observer, any changes to the rule would make little to no improvements to the current rule. Having said that, I would be in favor of allowing a single champ provisional, to the current champ, and to be used in all points paying events.”
My reply to Marc is: (I’m standing on my soapbox right now, so get ready)
Marc,
No slam taken and I hope you don’t take this as a slam either. Point well taken, but I have a problem with the article you provided a link to. In the article they only do their analysis on 8 races, hardly a significant sampling (you must have at least 25% for it to be classed as an accurate sampling) – also it does not have an accurate representation of all the different types of tracks in NASCAR (ie. no road courses).
They also wanted to get rid of the Talladega results because they were ‘skewed’ due to the fact that it was an impound race and the ‘go or go home’ teams put their cars in qualifying trim because they wanted to make the show while the Top 35 cars all qualified in race trim and qualified poorly. That is exactly my point. If there were no Top 35 rule then, the top 35 cars would have had to set their cars up differently to make sure they made the field yet were still competitive enough to race. All of the teams would be more equal. Isn’t that what NASCAR claims they want?
They also didn’t count Daytona, “which has its own (qualifying) procedure.” What? You still have to count it because they still used the top 35 rule to set the bottom end of the field.
The only exemption I agree with is Texas because qualifying was rained out, but let me say if there were no top 35 rule then the standings would have been different and some of those drivers outside of the top 43 would have been in the top 43 and made that race. So in the end they were still affected.
Another problem with this article is that it was published in the middle of July (almost halfway through the season) but it only looked at the first 10 races? What about May and June? I’ll leave July out of it so they could have time to collect, analyze and publish the data.
The interesting thing about working with data is that you can manipulate it to make it say what ever you want based on your own bias. I know, I’ve taken a course on data manipulation. What would be a more accurate and unbiased look at this would be to take all the races since the top 35 rule has been instituted into account– eliminating rain outs of course.
Now let’s look at this; “For the eight races in which traditional qualifying was held, 8.1 percent of the cars making the fields would have changed if NASCAR had allowed in the fastest 43.” Based on that and what follows in the article you are given the impression by the author that 8.1% is insignificant, and it would be if it were a 1000 car field but that 8.1% represents 4 cars (actually 3.48, but since you can’t have 0.48 of a car you must round up – those are the rules) that are effected each and every race for the 8 races they looked at. That is significant in my opinion. 4 cars/teams of the 43 car field is a significant amount. They then justify this by saying that it doesn’t matter anyway because there are always more than 43 cars trying to make the race, so someone has to go home anyway. Again, what? Of course someone has to go home, it is a fact of life, but why do the faster cars have to go home – in particular the 4 cars that are affected each and every race?
What I would really like to see is for The Observer to go back and revisit this subject again and take into account all of the races since 2005 (when the rule was first instituted) and look at the whole picture instead of a snapshot.
I too am tired of hearing about this, and until NASCAR does something about it I guess we’ll just have to continue to keep hearing about it. As far as a one Champ Provisional for the current Champ and no Past Champion’s Provisional, I could live with that.
Still friends?
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