Scott Fowler: NASCAR just radically changed its playoff format. Will it be enough?

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If you were a fan of NASCAR in the 2000s but fell off the bandwagon at some point, this sport has got a deal for you.

It’s a new playoff system, but it’s actually the original playoff system — “The Chase” that NASCAR ran from 2004-2013. They’re rebooting it like it’s a movie franchise.

Those playoff elimination races of recent years, when a playoff field was cut to 12 drivers, and then to eight, and then to four, and everyone talked about who was on the brink of elimination more than who actually won the race? That no longer exists.

In its place will be The Chase, a 10-race playoff system for the top 16 drivers after a 26-race regular season. Points will accumulate for 10 straight races in the playoffs, so technically a driver could clinch a championship before the final race was ever run. That’s a far cry from the more recent format, when the final four drivers all competed in a one-race finale for the Cup title.

This is not the old-old format of the Dale Earnhardt Sr. years, either — the one in which points from every Cup race were simply added up, with no playoffs at all. Some people campaigned for that “36 races and just add it all up” system. But it’s not the one-race crapshoot of recent years, either, which had drawn more and more grumbling from the NASCAR garage over the past several years because of its inherent randomness. It was like if you got to the Super Bowl, but then declared a winner after the first quarter.

“I feel like we’re going to get a little bit of a taste of the nostalgia that a bunch of us want, but we’re also going to have a little bit of some of the modern NASCAR that people appreciate,” said Dale Earnhardt Jr., the racer-turned-broadcaster who remains the most recognizable face in the sport. “So it’s a bit of a hybrid that we’re going to hit. We’re going to move forward with it, and I’m thankful.”

“I’m really excited,” former racer Mark Martin said. “I think it’s fantastic. I would just appeal to the race fans — all the race fans, but especially the classic fans — who say to me, ‘I don’t watch anymore.’ I say, ‘We need you. Come on back. We’re headed in the right direction. Come back and join with us.’ ”

Dale Jr. and Martin were among a handful of NASCAR current and former stars and race officials that the sport trotted on Monday afternoon in a glitzy, live-streamed unveiling of its new format at NASCAR’s production studio in Concord.

This was very much a “look at us, we’re changing things!” moment, and one that NASCAR needed.

The sport had an awful December, one that started with a lot of dirty laundry being dragged further through the mud in Charlotte at the “Michael Jordan vs. NASCAR” antitrust trial (which was ultimately settled). Then, on Dec. 18, former NASCAR star Greg Biffle, his wife, two of his children and three others were all killed in a plane crash at the Statesville airport. A public memorial service for the seven people lost in the crash will be held Friday in Charlotte.

But the sport goes on, as it always has for the past 75 years. The Daytona 500 is coming in February. And when someone wins Daytona, the announcers won’t say, “He’s in the playoffs!” because that’s another thing that’s changing.

There’s no more “win and you’re in,” and that’s in part because NASCAR doesn’t want to just reward a one-race wonder for a playoff spot. They want to reward consistency. They also want a format that can be explained in an elevator pitch, and what they had? That wasn’t it.

“I think we oftentimes forget how good we had it through all those years of the Chase format,” said the aptly named Chase Elliott, one of the biggest stars among current NASCAR drivers. “I think it is a really nice compromise.”

Now will this new format change the sport on its own?

No, of course not. But the first step to solving a problem is admitting you have a problem. And Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR’s president, believes it will help.

“I don’t want anyone to think we’re naive and that we’re just going to change this format and everything’s great, right?” O’Donnell said. “We think it’s one component of what we need to do.”

Will the format actually be better? I think so. I certainly understood The Chase better than the more recent playoff permutations.

But I will guarantee you it won’t be worse. NASCAR’s previous format allowed fans to drift in and out of seasons, because it was all just going to come down to that random, final race anyway. Even the sport’s most enthusiastic loyalists knew that.

Said Earnhardt Jr.: “I had grown very tired of what we were doing. … And I want to be drawn like a moth to a flame to this sport every single week… Honestly, the way we were doing it, it was allowing me to take a couple weekends off and check in later. See the highlights on Tuesdays. Whatever. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that feeling.”

I believe NASCAR knows in its heart that it went too far with trying to engage new fans. Moving out of old tracks to fancy new ones all over the country alienated a large portion of its core constituency. There has since been a return to some of the older tracks, such as North Wilkesboro Speedway.

“We wanted to make sure we’ve done a lot of things recently like going back to the Bowman Grays of the world,” said O’Donnell, mentioning the classic Winston-Salem track that will host the “Cook Out Clash” on Feb. 1. “We’re trying to really embrace, you know, kind of that core fan base.”

To the hardest of that hard core, this isn’t going to do it. They wanted a 36-race, no playoff format, like the way it used to be in the 1980s, not the 2000s.

“Yeah, it’s not going to be enough for some,” Martin said. “You just can’t make everyone happy. I think that it is the best possible scenario that you could have asked for.”