It wasn’t even a month ago that the SMART Modified Tour, a regional traveling series in the Mid-Atlantic, had to make a controversial decision about its elimination playoff format.
This is a format, mind you, that is effectively similar to the one used by NASCAR, but its with a SMART 3 instead of the Championship 4 but the ultimate winner is decided the same way — highest finishing driver takes all.
A rain out for the third-to-last race, and a de facto technical violation in the second-to-last race, resulted in a series officials deciding to make all five playoff drivers championship eligible for the finale at North Wilkesboro instead.
It came across as kind of amateurish, but given the facts, probably the fairest thing to do and one of the top-three drivers all season in Luke Baldwin, son of NASCAR legend Tommy Baldwin Jr., won the championship that night.
No, this isn’t to say that the NASCAR Cup Series should have a Final Three or a Final Five this weekend at Phoenix but it’s disappointing that it at least comes to mind as a potential option for everything that transpired on Sunday at Martinsville.
First, Christopher Bell did not attempt to replicate the now banned ‘Hail Melon’ from 2022. Bell attempted to make the corner in Turn 3, something Chastain had zero intent to do two years ago, broke traction trying to get around Bubba Wallace and slid into the wall and never even gained positions in staying in the gas.
The SMT data, in all liklihood, supports that whim too.
But NASCAR had to call the penalty because it can’t rule on intent, and a failure to act will also set a precedence that a ‘half Hail Melon’ is legal while encouraging everyone to just full-throttle drill the wall In Turn 4 instead.
So the logic there is sound.
With that said, there was radio scanner audio from the No. 20 team that implied fellow Toyota stablemate Wallace was going to back up to Bell and concede the position needed to advance to the championship race over William Byron.
At the same time, Byron literally had a Chevrolet escort behind him in the form of Austin Dillon and Ross Chastain to ensure that the Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 could finish no worse than six and advance to the championship race over Bell by just one spot, technically a tiebreaker.
There were various radio transmissions across the Richard Childress Racing No. 3 and Trackhouse Racing No. 1 teams that indicated ‘a deal’ and the plan to make sure that Chevrolet advance.
It was strategically sound by everyone but ethically dubious, maybe even illicit, and felt thematically similar to every dirty thing that transpired in the regular season finale at Richmond in 2013 where several teams conspired with each other to manipulate the results to generate a desired outcome.
This also isn’t that much a departure from the Cup Series cutoff race at the Roval in 2022 where Cole Custer was ordered to block traffic to help Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Chase Briscoe make passes and advance into the next round over Kyle Larson. That resulted in the months long suspension of crew chief Mike Shiplett, a $100,000 fine to the team, and Custer losing 50 points.
NASCAR did not swap out Briscoe for Larson.
At a minimum, the Trackhouse and Childress teams have to be assessed the same penalty here, right? In the same spirit that even a half ‘Hail Melon’ being permitted would encourage it to become commonplace, no penalties for the Chevrolet contigent is just encouraging a manufacturer to orchestrate any number of rolling blockades on Sunday at Phoenix.
Silence is permission.
All of this is to say that neither the Byron nor Bell camps relied on performance alone in their efforts to make the Championship 4, but it’s also increasingly what this format encourages, especially when the performance margins are so thin with a tightly policed single source supplied car.
The format is certainly exciting, and despite producing controversies like this, still has competition merits like performing in moments that count the most and its emphasis on winning.
And really, it wasn’t even so much the actions that led to manipulating the results at the end on Sunday that felt wrong as much as it was the blatant disregard for ethics in how brazen and indifferent all involved were in talking about it over the radio.
There wasn’t even an effort to mask it with code words.
And maybe, as Hendrick Motorsports Jeff Gordon articulated on Monday, this is just part of racing. It’s teams and manufacturer alliances taking care of their kin. There were no intentional spins like what happened at Richmond in 2013 or dubious trips to pit road.
And if that’s the case, NASCAR will say as much this week with its decision to penalize or not, what it has since seen and heard from the Chevrolet teams especially in the closing laps. But if that is an established set precedence, get ready for all sorts of similar blockades and escorts to decide championships this weekend at Phoenix.
Or, it’s never too late to have a SMART 3 instead of a Championship 4.
So many distractions
This week should be about a focus on crowning the Cup Series champion and certainly it still can, but so far this week has been about sorting through what happened in the final minutes of the race at Martinsville and the lawsuit brought forth by 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports.
Even a decision on the preliminary injunction, determining whether those teams retain charters into next season, will come before the end of the week. It could happen on Media Day on Thursday or even during Cup Series practice or the Truck Series championship race.
It’s just one distraction after another right now, where everything seems to be about things other than the racing product, like the bi-annual meetings after the race outside of the Cup Series hauler to discuss some controversial race control ruling with Elton Sawyer.
There is even the surreal scenario where Tyler Reddick, who drives for 23XI Racing, could win the top championship in the league in which the team he drives for is suing.
This scenario would kind of become so unfair to Reddick because the talk would certainly be more about the lawsuit than it would be celebrating the accomplishment.
Here’s to hoping the Truck Series has literally anything better than what happened last year, something best articulated as a shit show of the highest caliber, and here’s to hoping the Xfinity Series race is just as good as it was last year and here’s to hoping another year of age on the surface at Phoenix combined with Goodyear’s efforts to produce better tires result in the best Cup Series championship race here yet.
The actual sporting side of this industry really needs that kind of weekend to close out the 2025 season.
Championship preview
This is the third time a NASCAR Cup Series championship will be decided at Phoenix Raceway in the NextGen era and both have been won by a Team Penske contender.
Joey Logano won the race and championship in 2022 and Ryan Blaney finished second to claim the championship behind non-contender Ross Chastain to win his first title. Both Logano and Blaney are in the championship race on Sunday.
When Logano won in 2022, in came with a sort of caveat that non-contender Blaney should have won that race, as he was arguably faster but chose to not press the issue against his teammate as a sort of buffer from the other contenders behind them.
This is to say that Penske has developed a good package on flat short tracks the past two years. And with Phoenix spring winner Bell not amongst the Final Four, the Penske duo might have the best unload package heading into the weekend.
Blaney has five straight top-5s at Phoenix but Logano and crew chief Paul Wolfe has had two weeks to focus entirely on preparing a car for this weekend. Logano has had his statistical worst season to this point, but won at the right times, and now has had a long time to prepare for this moment.
That makes the 22 the overall favorite.
However, do not count out Reddick, who led the most laps in the spring race and may have access to the same Toyota notebook that made Bell so dominant in the spring. He and crew chief Billy Scott have also had an extra week to focus entirely on this race. Martinsville simply didn’t matter to them.
That makes Byron the long shot of the four, but that sounds absurd at face value too because he has a NextGen win at Phoenix in the spring of 2023 and now has the good fortune of everyone at Hendrick Motorsports placing their entire focus on the No. 24 car above all else.
This is the same company that has won championships at Phoenix in 2020 and 2021 with Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson respectively.
But, upon throwing it all into a blender, conventional wisdom leans towards the two Penske cars with the 22 having an edge over the 12, only because Logano and Wolfe are amongst the all-time greats and have already put a great deal of resources into this weekend.
What do YOU think?
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.