All Points Lead to Drama: The “Excitement” of Racing for a Cup

For the majority of motor racing over the 20th Century, any season-long points championship was decided by who accumulated the most points by the end of the year. If your series had 30 races then whoever tallied the most points, regardless of wins or when/where they occurred, generally that driver was awarded the series Championship. Certainly, there have been gimmicks over the years: double point events, loyalty requirements etc but beyond a reasonable doubt it’s generally agreed that the best performer over the whole season would wear the crown at the end of it all.

In 2004, NASCAR changed everything in the narrative of American oval racing. Abandoning the “Winston Cup” style of point championship which laid out a numerically strange but satisfyingly competitive points table for a 10 race end of season “Chase” (later renamed to Playoff), the dramatics of the final push of the series took hold over the need for consistency. It’s been tweaked, poked, prodded, and tweaked again, but no matter how you slice it the last few races of the NASCAR season mean a great deal different than anything in the first few months for the drivers chasing the Championship. There’s no need to settle any debate here about whether it’s right or wrong for NASCAR to have made the change and continue to pursue it, but suffice it to say, it’s made a difference in how the largest racing brand in the country is consumed. 

In response over the last 20 years, other brands of motorsport have experimented with their points championship to somehow find that impossible balance of excitement and credibility. All with the impossible dream that it can be repeated on a regular basis. For the 2023 season, the Lucas Oil Dirt Late Model Series made a controversial change to how it would crown their champion.

While hosting a 56 event long calendar, the top 4 drivers in points would have a points reset before the 100 lap Dirt Track World Championship at Eldora, with the best finish of those 4 drivers being crowned the National Champion. While it should be stated that all 4 of the Championship eligible drivers collected six figure sums for their efforts in the season, the hard fact remained that the season long 4th place driver could win the National Championship.

Naturally in the first season of this experiment, not only has the entering points leader to Eldora been dominant, but there’s a case that it’s been one of the finest dirt late model seasons in history. Ricky Thornton Jr., totalling a record 23 feature wins, more than 3 times the series wins than any of the other 4 eligible drivers, came into the Eldora weekend with nothing left to prove but a final cherry on top to cap the best season ever.

With a rough track surface mainly due to weather, the driver known as RTJ hit a rut and had a collision that resulted in losing a lap and pacing in back the field. Ultimately Thornton finished behind the newly crowned champion Hudson O’Neal, who crossed the line second for the Eldora feature behind the non-championship eligible Brandon Sheppard. What should have been an unfortunate bit of tough luck for one race that kept a driver from a few thousand more dollars, it robbed the dominant series driver from a piece of his legacy. To much of the racing public, the history books will be forever asterisked.

I feel this needs to be shared, as here’s the broadcast directly addressing that “we voted” in a paraphrase of an RTJ comment. Something ain’t adding up. @RThornton20rt

(Video aired by MAVTV/FloRacing and is posted here under Fair Use) pic.twitter.com/y20kzZhMQy

— Matthew Burroughs (@MJBurroughs) October 23, 2023

While there’s been some controversy on whether the drivers “voted on” making this change to the series championship or not, the fact remains that this is a switch in narrative from the decades of dirt racing that’s led to this point. From where I sit as a fan of both NASCAR and dirt racing, I feel toyed with, and feel that we’re trying to change history on the fly. Let me try to explain…

In NASCAR, the series has made it painfully clear that their championship is awarded in the pursuit of drama. The “game 7 moments” that the series itself claims they want to see have come often, and they are at least attempting to go all-in on that mentality. In the Lucas Oil Late Model series, it feels like they’re trying to play it from both ends, and robbing both theories of any credibility. For the dirt boys, there was no Playoff series, no build up, no points handicapping, nothing at all before the 56th event where the rules suddenly changed for 100 laps. Again, to make it painfully clear, I’m not saying a playoff format is good, but if you’re going to do it, there has to be more investment than one race especially in the world of dirt track racing.

Think of how different a dirt surface can be for one night. Heavy rains, lack of rain, winds, and all sorts of variables are at play. There’s no way you can all-but-guarantee a certain type of race track like you can in pavement racing, and with one shot at it the Lucas Oil series was dealt a bad hand. Eldora is a high banked fast as heck track that can be very dangerous or just outright undrivable with a rough surface. While the show must go on…and did, it’s difficult to say that was the right environment for a “winner take all” finale.

Perhaps most important, this race wasn’t made any more exciting by having this format. Magnified by the track conditions, the race ended up more of a disappointment than a success for most involved. Not only did Ricky Thornton Jr lose out on a piece of history, race winner Brandon Sheppard misses out on some notoriety as well, as we should be talking more about his impressive run on the rough track than the points battle. No, it’s not as much fun in the context of points racing when the dominant driver has it in the bag well before the finale, but that shouldn’t matter. More to the point, the championship being naturally exciting is its very own reward.

In 2021 Formula 1 had a final race where Lewis Hamilton and eventual champion Max Verstappen were tied on points, and it produced its own brand of controversy and drama that had nothing to do with how the points were scored. In 1992 the NASCAR Winston Cup finale at Atlanta had 6 drivers eligible to win and is still talked about today as one of NASCAR’s finest moments. Both series, as well as track and series championships across the country have struggled with “boring” points championships, but for my money that makes the better years even more enjoyable. Anything splendid is rare, and there’s nothing harder to find than perfection.

Most race fans can appreciate a race for what it is. Last night at Eldora was a weird one. While there were many unfortunate mishaps, there was its own brand of excitement and drama from cars racing the surface and making the most of the unique situation. Even when the championship is well in hand, the races themselves can still be exciting and we can do more to benefit the event than rerack the points and call it drama. While NASCAR is fiddling about what to do with millions of viewers and multimillion dollar advertising deals for every single competitor, I’m not convinced the answer for grassroots based racing is to copy-cat their ideas. If anything, the more NASCAR and dirt racing stay apart, the better it is to see a moment when they come together.

Ricky Thornton Jr may not be the 2023 Lucas Oil Dirt Late Model National Champion on paper, but to thousands of others that asterisk will live on for decades…and that’s surely nothing to grow a series around.

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