The Latford System is dead.
Long live win and advance.
Listen, you are going to claw your brains out trying to apply the standards of the weighted average virtues of a full season campaign like NASCAR did from 1975 to 2003 to what it does not with the current national touring championship format.
As was the argument last week after Harrison Burton won Daytona and bumped his way from 34th in the championship standings to no worse than 16th by the end of the season, the average finish and championship points earned over 26 races simply does not matter compared to the importance of winning a race.
This isn’t unfair nor has it caught anyone by surprise 11 years since its implementation as everyone knows when unloading for the Daytona 500 that the number one goal is to win a race for both competition and financial reason.
That isn’t to say the status quo is better than anything that came before it, and good faith arguments can certainly be made for both but the standards are simply not the same.
Chris Buescher finished the regular season 11th in the championship standings with the fourth best average finish over the course of the season but none of that matters as much as getting walled by Tyler Reddick at Darlington in May and losing to Kyle Larson by 0.001 seconds a week later at Kansas.
He and Scott Graves won three times last year and that is why they made an extended playoff run deep into October.
Bubba Wallace was 13th in the regular season standings, the most consistent campaign of his career but that also doesn’t matter because he didn’t win, and that is all that matters now.
Kyle Busch is one of the greatest of all-time, Mount Rushmore caliber, and the accolades don’t matter in a 16th place regular season points finish because he also lost in a photo finish to Daniel Suarez at Atlanta, finished second to Burton at Daytona and couldn’t find a way past Chase Briscoe on Sunday at Darlington.
Suarez won.
Burton won.
Briscoe won.
Cindric won.
Austin Dillon also won … albeit under the most dubious of circumstances and had his playoff berth stripped away as a result but this is to all illustrate why he tried everything he did on the final lap at Richmond.
This isn’t the Latford System and winning races is the most important thing in the NASCAR Cup Series.
For better or for worse, former NASCAR CEO Brian France seethed when a driver got out of a car with a top-five and looked into the television cameras and said ‘but it was a good points day.’ You don’t have to agree with France but you can’t argue that Buescher, Wallace, Busch and Chastain qualify into the Round of 16 over winners Suarez, Briscoe, Burton and Cindric simply because they had 26 good points days.
That isn’t the game anymore and you are going to drive yourself insane, and into a figurative wall, trying to make that argument.
Points do matter, by the way, because Martin Truex Jr. and Ty Gibbs had enough good points days, finishing inside the top-10 of the final regular season championship standings that they remained above the cutline.
The regular season champion, even if that driver goes winless, automatically scores a playoff berth too, even in the unlikely scenario where there are 16 different winners and the regular season champion isn’t one of them.
You can advance to the Round of 16 on points but that driver had best be the most exceptional to do so, and really, that kind of team is going to win a race more often than not anyway.
Suarez, Cindric, Burton and Briscoe aren’t winning the championship but neither were Buescher, Wallace, Busch and Chastain. This format substituted the good points day Round of 16 field fillers for the race winning Round of 16 field fillers.
Why?
Because this format is about winning races and doesn’t fundamentally change which teams are ultimately going to contend for the championship over the next 10 races. This championship will be decided amongst some combination of Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, William Byron, Denny Hamlin, Chase Elliott and Tyler Reddick.
They win races and tend to score the most points in the process.
The next three races are going to be about winning and advancing because that’s what the past 26 races were about too. Certainly, there is a pathway to advance on points, especially with the smaller sample size, but that buffer was probably built upon winning races in the regular season too.
Look, once again, this is not a perfect championship format based on the merits of consistency of fairness but when 34 drivers signed up to race for the championship in February, they all knew the rules.
No one told them you need to have 26 good points days.
Everyone told them they needed to win.
The Latford System is dead.