If I may ask, why do we have an owners championship in NASCAR?
No really, what purpose does maintaining a separate championship for drivers and a separate championship for the owners of cars serve? The main prize at the end of the day is the drivers title. The owners title almost always goes to the owner of the car driven by the driver who won the drivers title. The only place it ever gets any real mention is in the XFINITY Series, and that’s because the races in the series are won by Cup drivers in Cup-affiliated rides more often than not.
Aside from bragging rights that carry less weight than the drivers title, owner points are used to set the lineup whenever qualifying is rained out. Why we can’t just use driver points or practice times to do this is beyond me, especially when NASCAR has shown a propensity to bypass qualifying in favor of practice time when the weather looks iffy.
But if we must continue with an owners championship, let’s adopt a different model to decide the champion. And you need to look no further than Formula 1 for the answer.
For those who don’t follow F1, their version of an owners championship, or “constructors’ championship,” involves the organization as a whole accumulating points towards a championship. So rather than the No. 44 (driven by Lewis Hamilton) and the No. 77 (driven by Valtteri Bottas) scoring points as individual car entries towards a championship, as is the case in NASCAR, they both score points combined for Mercedes.
So let’s scrap the current owners championship model in NASCAR and replace it with the one used in Formula 1, or one similar to that used in Formula 1.
And I know not every team runs a multi-car operation in NASCAR. So to keep the playing field level, points will only be accumulated by the highest finishing car from each organization.
My reasoning behind pushing this is that making the owners title a more organization-centered points battle would add relevance to it as it does with the constructors’ title in Formula 1.
Of course if NASCAR chooses not to, nothing is really lost. The focus will still be on the drivers championship as it should be. I just personally think it would be fun to see what lengths teams would go to win a more organization-based owners championship.
Now this is a chance I overlooked something. So if you find any oversights in this, please hit me up on Twitter or in the comments below.
That’s my view for what it’s worth.
