[media-credit name=”Barry Albert” align=”alignright” width=”263″]
[/media-credit]Let’s examine The Chase. The tracks that are involved these days are Chicagoland, New Hampshire, Dover, Talladega, Charlotte, Kansas, Martinsville, Texas, Phoenix and Homestead.
Six tracks owned by International Speedway Corporation, the track ownership arm of NASCAR, three by Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports and Dover. Where are Bristol, Darlington and even Indy?
My Chase schedule would look like this:
Bristol
Chicago
Darlington
Dover
Talladega
Charlotte
Martinsville
Texas
Atlanta
Homestead
Let New Hampshire take the Bristol August date. Let Kansas stay at one date (do we really need another date at a track that just happens to have a casino which is conveniently owned by the sanctioning body?), Put the exciting Atlanta track in the Chase and let the boring Phoenix race take it’s date. Perfect schedule, in my opinion. Mix it up by putting Watkins Glen in the Chase and dump Atlanta. Regardless it gives us a more even schedule with four SMI tracks and five ISC tracks in the mix with one independent. It will never happen, but it sure would make more exciting racing by adding Darlington and Bristol in the mix. I’m dreaming.
With the schedule being pretty much the same since the inception of the Chase, the same drivers seem to come to the top. Changing it up might make it a challenge. As many of you know I hate the Chase, and with the new simple rules that were supposed to make it easier for fans to follow the points race, NASCAR threw in the Wildcard race that no one understands (or at least none of us with a math degree). At least, let’s make the racing interesting, move the final ten races to the base of the sport, and bring back the fans who built this sport from the beginning. Six of the ten races would do this. I know this is falling on deaf ears, but it makes sense to me,
