(Hi.  In 2006, I posted what I thought was a better version of the Chase.  In 2007, I updated the system to reflect the changes NASCAR had made - adding drivers and giving bonus points for wins instead of based on points positions.  I haven't been posting as much, but I've still been keeping track.  Here's a repost of the post from last year that explained everything - plus this year's standings using my system.  Everyone would be FREAKING OUT if the points ACTUALLY looked this way, I think.)

In 2004 NASCAR introduced the Chase to the Nextel Cup, taking the top-ten in points after Richmond, resetting their point totals and letting them race for the championship.  Somewhat surprisingly Kurt Busch, who had been seventh heading into the Chase, won the 2004 championship.  Busch won the first Chase race and finished fourth, fifth, or sixth in the next seven of the last nine races en route to the title.  In many of those races Busch was third or fourth among the ten Chasers at the end.

Meanwhile, Jimmie Johnson got off to a shakier start, and finished ninth among the ten Chasers at both Talladega and Kansas.  However, in the last six races he WON four times and was the highest-finishing Chaser FIVE times.  IMO, there shouldn't be ANY way a driver who defeats all of his direct competition in HALF of the races should be ahead of a driver who did so only once.

It was that reasoning that led me to create my own version of the Chase for the Nextel Cup.  I had tinkered with a way to score the ten Chasers separately, while at the same time rewarding trying to reward the Chasers for racing against the non-Chasers.  Finding a balance between those two factors is important, because if you ONLY have the Chasers racing against each other, you could have a situation near the end of a race where there is a Chaser in third-place, behind a non-Chaser in second-place, but that Chaser wouldn't have any incentive to try and make that pass at the risk of his place among the Chasers.

The solution was to have two ways to score points.  First, the Chasers were placed in order from first-to-tenth and given points exactly like the F1 system (10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1-0-0).  Last year at Kansas Mark Martin finished third, but was the highest finishing Chaser, so he received ten points.  NASCAR has already separated the ten (now twelve) Chasers, so there should be a premium on how they do against each other.

The second way to score points is to earn bonus points for finishing in the top-ten.  If a Chaser gets a top-ten finish, he receives bonus points with ten for winning, nine for second, down to one for tenth.  THAT is important because that means Mark Martin's Kansas result (third while beating all of the other Chasers) was worth 18 points (ten for beating the Chasers plus eight bonus points for finishing third), slightly less than a Chaser would score for winning (which was worth the maximum of 20 points).

Now, after the 2006 season NASCAR tossed a couple of curveballs into the Chase.  First, they added two drivers for a total of twelve.  I thought about leaving the points the same, so that eight among the Chasers still received one point and ninth through twelfth received zero points, but ultimately I decided to add some points, so that only the last two Chasers in any race receive zero points.  I think it is better to have all of the Chasers, even in a race where several have off-days, continue to try and beat each other all day if there is the opportunity to do so.

The second thing NASCAR did is change the way they seed the drivers at the beginning of the Chase.  Like NASCAR, I had awarded points at the start of the Chase based on where the drivers sat in points after Richmond.  I didn't necessarily like NASCAR's change to seed the drivers by wins at the time, but it turned out to create real drama at the end of some the races in the Race to the Chase, AND it dictated strategy as teams decided to go for broke for wins (most notably Jeff Gordon's crazy pit strategy that got him a victory at Pocono).  Therefore, I had to change my own system accordingly.

Finally, here is the JJD Modified Chase for the Nextel Cup v2.0.  *ta-DAA*

Bonus points:  After messing around with various ways to work with the change to award bonus points based on wins, I decided the best way to go was to give each driver five points for each pre-Chase win.  I had decided to go this way before the season, just like NASCAR, and in each of the previous three seasons of the Chase the most races a driver had won was five, while six (in 2005) or seven (in 2004 and 2006) Chasers had won more than one race.  Naturally in 2007 Jimmie Johnson has won SIX races, and only FIVE Chasers have won more than one race, but that kind of thing is going to happen when you make rash decisions based on only three years of data.

Kyle Busch gets 40 points based on his eight wins before the Chase.  Since Carl Edwards got penalized the bonus points he would have had for winning Las Vegas, I took away the five points he would have received and he gets 25 instead of 30 to start the Chase.

Scoring:  The expanded field meant I had to decide whether to change the scoring.  The bonus points are going to stay the same, so that they are only awarded for a top-ten finish.  I guess theoretically the Chasers could finish first through twelfth in a given race, but then the guy in eleventh would be eleventh among the Chasers, which does not seem like a bonus-worthy result.

OTOH, I am adding points so that there is more separation between the first-place Chaser and the eighth-place or last-place Chaser in each race.  Now the maximum number of points a Chaser could receive is 25 in a single race, with 15 for beating the other Chasers and ten bonus points for winning.  Therefore, if the race at Richmond had been a Chase race, the points awarded would have looked like this:

 1 Jimmie Johnson      15 points + 10 bonus points
 2 Tony Stewart        12 points + 9 bonus points
 3 Denny Hamlin        10 points + 8 bonus points
 4 Dale Earnhardt Jr.   8 points + 7 bonus points
 6 Jeff Burton          6 points + 5 bonus points
 7 Kevin Harvick        5 points + 4 bonus points
 8 Jeff Gordon          4 points + 3 bonus points
12 Clint Bowyer         3 points
13 Carl Edwards         2 points
14 Greg Biffle          1 points
15 Kyle Busch           0 points
39 Matt Kenseth         0 points

As the NASCAR system works, Kyle Busch would have received 72 more points than Matt Kenseth.  That makes sense on the one hand, since Kyle finished so far ahead of Matt, but Matt finished 39th because he got caught up in someone else's wreck, which is bad luck as much as anything.  OTOH, Kyle ran poorly in comparison to the TEN Chasers who finished ahead of him.  Does he REALLY deserve any kind of reward for finishing 11th out of 12?  I say no.

So, here are the current standings for 2008 with two races to go.