Of all the drivers competing in NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series, Mark Martin just may be the only one who has the right perspective on racing.  I’ve touched on this before, but so much emphasis is placed on a championship that individual races seem to blur.  Who wins the race is no longer what matters to the media.  How somebody ran on a certain day is not important.  Every story and every comment is about who gain the most points in the championship battle.  In other words, it’s not the race that matters; it’s who is leading in the points battle.  I find that horribly wrong.

Martin was a guest on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Trading Paint on Thursday and all the questions to Martin concerned Chase.  Martin answered over and over that he didn’t care about the championship.  His comment, which he repeated over and over, was that he was in the sport to win races.  He even said the forbidden sentence.  He didn’t care about winning the Sprint Cup.  It’s not surprising that this man who has lived over five decades might have his head screwed on straight, but it is surprising that he would utter those words for the world to hear.  I mean, we’ve been educated by the sanctioning body, the television reporters, and every radio program and newspaper article that winning the championship was all that.  And now, Martin, probably at the peak of his popularity as a driver, says that it isn’t that important to him.

Denny Hamlin touched on this at Martinsville a few weeks ago.  In his winner’s interview, he made the comment to the media that all the headlines wouldn’t be about his win in his home state, but how many points Jimmie Johnson had gained on the rest of the field.  He’s right.  The headline in one of my local papers was, “Johnson Pads Lead as Hamlin Wins.”  Isn’t that a kick in the head to Hamlin?  He won the race, but Johnson gets the first mention.

Back before the sport started its growth spurt starting in the 1980’s, you almost had to read the paper the next morning to see who was leading in the championship race.  Yes, we were all aware that Richard Petty had seven championships and Dale Earnhardt had a few, but what mattered to the fans was that race on that day.  Sure, it was important to the drivers, but it wasn’t emphasized so much until the last race or so.  Even then, only the last race, where a champion was actually crowned, was where the champion got more attention than the winner of the race.  Then came that fateful day at Rockingham, NC, in 2003, and it changed everything.  Matt Kenseth had clinched the Nextel Cup championship early and had won only one race that year.  The Chase was born and individual victories didn’t matter as much as where you stood in the driver standings.

Everyone knows I find the Chase an unnatural format.  Patterned after the NFL and MLB playoffs, it just doesn’t work for me.  In those situations, the field is slimmed to only teams that win their division and a wild card in each league or division.  In NASCAR, everyone races, so that means that even if a driver is among the “chosen 12”, he can finish so far behind the rest of the field after an accident (like Jimmie Johnson had at Texas), that his hopes are dimmed for the rest of the Chase run.  It’s like allowing all the major league baseball teams to participate in the playoffs, but only the four teams who qualify for the championship having their wins count.  It makes no sense.

The argument was that the Chase would help TV ratings and create interest during the fall when the NFL launched a new season and the baseball playoffs and World Series were going on.  The ratings for the Chase races this year show it isn’t working.  Compared to last year, 2.5 million less people are watching the Chase races than last year, according to television ratings.  We have all seen the empty seats at the tracks lately.  And the economy cannot be blamed for folks watching the NFL this time of year. 

It’s time to go back to having the philosophy of Mark Martin.  Martin said that his team tries to win every practice, every pole, and every race and lets the chips fall where they may.  That’s the attitude of a real racer, something that seems to have gone away in the era of points racing and the playoff system.  Let’s bring that attitude back.