Xfinity Series: Time to embrace the Owner’s Championship
NASCAR’s Xfinity Series seems to be in a perpetual identity crisis. Sprint Cup drivers dominate Victory Lane, and drivers who rarely compete for wins are competing for championships. What if there is a way to make the Xfinity Series stand out as unique? And what if it is something NASCAR already does, but nobody really discusses?
I enjoy the Xfinity Series. I do not have a problem with Cup drivers dropping down and “stealing” the wins from Xfinity regulars. I do not have a problem with Cup teams developing crew chief, pit crew, and car builder-talent by having their best drivers (Cup drivers, naturally) drive their Xfinity cars and compete for wins. I do not believe the Xfinity Series – as a racing series – needs to be “fixed.”
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NASCAR tried to “fix” the Xfinity Series in 2011. After five straight years of Cup drivers winning the JV series championship, NASCAR ruled that each driver must compete for only one series championship., leading to seasons like 2013, where Cup drivers won 29 of 33 then-Nationwide races anyway, and Austin Dillon “earned” the Nationwide Series championship without winning a race.
(Am I the only one who thinks a driver going to Homestead for the season finale with both championships on the line would have been awesome? I believe Kyle Busch once said he thought winning both championships in the same season was the greatest thing a NASCAR driver could accomplish…and that’s a bad idea? Sometimes I think NASCAR is just determined not to let their fans have nice things.)
Since the start of the 2011 season, championship-eligible drivers have won 38 Xfinity races, out of 168 starts! Has NASCAR’s “one championship” policy curbed Cup drivers from poaching nearly 80% of the Xfinity Series wins? Obviously not. And I have yet to see an article about Xfinity Series television ratings or attendance improving directly as a result of the decision to exclude the drivers that win the most races from the series championship.
In 2016, NASCAR has instituted the Chase in the Xfinity Series: 26 pre-Chase races leading to a seven-race Chase among 12 championship-eligible drivers. Drivers, who – probably – will have accounted for as many wins combined as you can count on one hand.
Is that satisfying to anyone? Has it been for the last few seasons?
However, there has been a championship in the Xfinity Series that would have some built-in drama. One that would reward the “best of the best”, and would perhaps, with this new Chase format, even result in an underdog, Xfinity-only team winning the championship. And NASCAR doesn’t even have to do anything to make it happen. They just have to get people talking about it.
I am referring to the Xfinity Series owner’s championship.
If you have followed the Xfinity Series, you know that when they get near the end of the season, a commentator (Marty Reid, usually) would talk about “the all-important owner’s title”. Did you know the owner’s champion gets the same amount of prize money at the NASCAR banquet as the drivers’ champion? It is a 50/50 split between drivers and owners, with a 99/1 split for people’s attention.
Did you know that despite Kyle Busch dominating the Xfinity Series since, like, 1976, his team hasn’t actually won the owner’s championship since 2012? That is because Team Penske’s #22 has beaten Joe Gibbs Racing’s #54 for the Xfinity owner’s championship three years in a row. Doesn’t that seem like an interesting storyline that people should be talking about? This is a thing that has actually happened!
And do not accuse Penske and JGR of entirely stacking the deck with their driver talent. Yes, Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano make most of the starts in Penske’s #22, but Ryan Blaney won in that car last year and Alex Tagliani nearly did as well. Meanwhile, Kyle Busch won several race in the JGR #54 (now #18), but last year Erik Jones did, too, and Boris Said (!) ran five (!!) races in that car. Why wasn’t that part of the story “the pressure is on Boris Said to not lose too many points to the 22”? All you have to do is promote it, NASCAR.
As of today, it is hard to imagine getting all that fired up about the 2016 Xfinity Series Chase for the Championship. If you look at the 2015 season*, you would see that starting the Chase would have been three drivers with a combined four wins (Chase Elliott, Chris Buescher, and Ryan Reed) and you could have easily picked the drivers out making up most of the Chase as the championship-eligible drivers from the Cup-affiliated Xfinity teams. The only “who makes the Chase” drama would have been for the final two spots, where Jeremy Clements and Ross Chastain were 11th and 12th in points after Chicago, with J.J. Yeley only two points out of the final spot.
(*Yes, I know things might have played out differently if the Chase had been a thing last year. But seriously, Clements, Chastain, and Yeley? That’s where the “drama” is?)
However, if you look at the 2015 owner’s race with the Chase applied? Wow. Headed to Chicago, NINE teams had wins (Joey Logano has won at Watkins Glen in the part-time Penske #12 and that car would not have been eligible for the Chase). Erik Jones had won in TWO Gibbs cars. THREE drivers had won in the Penske #22. Two drivers had won in the #33 for Richard Childress Racing, and both the #54 and #20 for JGR. All three JR Motorsports cars (the #7, #9, and #88) had won. And although he had not won a race, Ty Dillon had driven the RCR #3 to fifth in owner’s points and would have been locked in to the owner’s Chase.
Meanwhile, the last two owner’s Chase spots would have been settled among four Xfinity Series “regulars”. Elliott Sadler, Brian Scott, Darrell Wallace Jr., and Daniel Suarez were separated by twelve points headed to Chicago. Any of the four would have clinched a spot in the theoretical 2015 owner’s Chase with a win. Would that not have been awesome? And as it turned out, Bubba Wallace finished third at Chicago and would have knocked Brian Scott out of the final Chase spot.
After the first round of the Chase, there would have been eight teams remaining. The #22 (Ryan Blaney, again), #7, and #33 would have advanced on wins, while the #20 would have advanced on points, along with four Xfinity-regular teams: the #60, #9, #1, and #6 teams all would have advanced to the second round. Who would not have advanced? The #54, and not because of Erik Jones, who finished 8th at Kentucky in his would-be Chase start). The #54 would have been left out due to a crash at Charlotte, where the car finished 31st. With Kyle Busch behind the wheel.
Admit it, you just fell in love with this, you Kyle Busch-haters.
The final four would have been the #22, the #20 (thanks to two Erik Jones top-4 finishes), the #33, and the #7. Four different teams, all race winners, all with either a mixture of Cup and non-Cup drivers or an Xfinity regular behind the wheel. Nobody would like this? It would be different, and fun, and would embrace the differences between the Xfinity Series and the Cup Series. It might even give the Xfinity Series – shhhhhh! – an indentity.
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I really believe if NASCAR started to push the Xfinity owner’s championship fans would get behind it. NASCAR would not have to limit the field in the season finale, where they currently have ruled out any Cup Chase drivers from competing (by the way, Kyle Larson won this race last year, and he would have been eligible even with the “no Cup Chasers” rule.) Instead of trying to avoid the embarrassment of the “championship drivers” running for sixth, behind five Cup drivers, they could have the top teams with the best drivers running for the owner’s title, and the teams with Xfinity-eligible drivers (by choice) still running for the driver’s championship.