The Nextel Cup has drivers and cars out the ying-yang, fans galore, 193 races per year, television outlets haggling for rights to broadcast each seven hour race, and a championship formula - The Chase - that's been modified, tweaked, and retro-fitted to produce a championship race that is as artificially close & exciting as their superspeedway races. It'll take the twelve best, and hopefully most popular drivers/car combinations, and over the final forty or so races of the season pit them in a heated, almost-from-scratch (see aforementioned tweaking & retro-fitting) race to the season championship. It was unacceptable to get to the last couple dozen races and already have the championship decided. So NASCAR stuck its fat little fingers into its racing once again, in an effort to manufacture greater suspense, and came up with the aforementioned Chase. Now NO ONE can run away with the race to the championship. Superiority throughout the regular season is barely acknowledged, and the top twelve racers are lumped together and considered nearly equal (I know, ... the bonus points ...). It didn't QUITE work perfectly last year - as Tony Stewart didn't make the Chase. So a little tweaking here, a little tweaking there, ... THERE, now we have it. Surely THIS time we'll get it right, and not exclude a fan favorite ...

... whoops ...

Meanwhile, the IndyCar series motors along uncomfortably. They typically field only 18 cars per race, and week in and week out there are three race teams competing for the win (the two Penske drivers , two Ganassi/Target drivers, and the four Andretti/Green drivers). But the finishes between them are very close week-in and week-out. Their season championship formula is the old fashioned one - win a race and you get more points (50) than the second place driver (40), who gets more points than the third place driver (35) & so on down to 10 "participation points" for all bottom finishers. They throw in 3 points for leading the most laps. The driver with the most points at the conclusion of the final race of the season IS THE CHAMPION. My DOG understands that formula.

Guess which series has boiled down to having the most exciting season ending? and guess which series has once again seen one of its most popular drivers excluded from a championship run?

There are three drivers with a chance to win the IndyCar season championship this coming weekend in Chicago: Scott Dixon, Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti, and Tony Kanaan. Last weekend the series leader crashed near the conclusion of the race and in the process (intentionally?) took out his closest competitor for the championship, giving Tony Kanaan the win and enough points to also have a chance to win the championship this coming weekend. The points lead has ebbed and flowed throughout the season. The drama producing the ebbs and flows has been significant - points leaders getting crashed or crashing themselves out of races, different drivers/cars have seemed unbeatably superior at different times during the season - and you never know who Danica Patrick will take out in a given race, OR who Michael Andretti will be ranting about after the conclusion of another race during which his son DNF'd.

You can try all you want to engineer an exciting conclusion to a race or a championship season. You can add restrictor plates to cars, you can create body and engine formulas so tight that it takes half a day to complete inspection, you can throw yellows every time a spotter sees a dandelion spew dangerous seeds onto the track, and you can create a complex championship points systems that will befuddle a chess master - but such controls don't guarantee superior racing. To excess, they can (and DO) actually DETRACT from superior racing.

Human skill, bravado, and luck produce superior racing.

Whether by hook or by crook, IndyCar produced and FEATURED superior racing this season.

The superior racing (which was abundant once again) in NASCAR was BURIED underneath all of the pulleys, cogs, and filters by which and through which it attempts to produce tight finishes.

I enjoy the flash and spectacle that surround Cup races. But give me the good ol' fashioned racing of IndyCar, or late model stock car racing, or any of the formulas which feature RACING, and not the fabulously popular but highly processed Cheese Whiz that is Nextel Cup racing.