NASCAR Xfinity, Truck Series playoff eligibility requirements must change

Final thoughts

NASCAR is struggling. Many tracks aren’t selling all their tickets. Drivers such as Kasey Kahne are retiring. Teams such as Furniture Row Racing are folding. What we as fans should do is generate ideas, with evidence to support then, to fix NASCAR.

With Cup Series drivers having dominated the Xfinity Series for a number of years, the Xfinity Series needs alternative ideas to highlight its slogan “Names are made here.” One way to do so is to incentivize the owners. If my idea is adopted, those owners would have a reason to field cars in races.

These owners could run part-time drivers in enough races to result in them qualifying for the Xfinity Series playoffs. They’ll make their names known, and they can become the groomed stars to fill the voids left by recently retired drivers or voids that are set to be left by soon-to-be-retired drivers.

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One issue left to deal with is the championship race at Homestead-Miami Speedway. All four drivers begin the race with the same amount of points. Is that a fair system, under my idea, if not all of the drivers competed in the same number of races? No.

So what NASCAR could do, especially because they values wins in this relatively new playoff system, is reward those four drivers with a certain amount of points for each win they accumulate during the season, much like regular playoff points but including only win totals as opposed to both win totals and stage win totals.

This would also encourages team owners to run those aforementioned drivers in more races. Lastly, and this may serve as the basis for a future article, but this would strengthen the case for NASCAR to take away victories if the race-winning driver fails post-race inspection.

Obviously, this idea is well outside of the box in terms of thinking about solutions to help NASCAR. This subject matter may not appear to make much of an impact on the surface level. Yet by diving deeper, we’ve discovered that there may be a ripple effect if this idea is adopted by NASCAR.

I hope you thought as you read this article. If you want to share something, please comment. Most importantly, if you dislike something about NASCAR, I challenge you to come up with a solution. In order to revitalize the sport we all love, we need to come up with answers to the problems.