Sep 3rd, 2010 by T.C.
The idea of multi-car qualifying is nothing new to motorsports. Our readers who follow Formula 1 racing (or other open wheel series) know what I’m talking about. It is however, a fairly new system for NASCAR. We’ve seen the Nationwide Series use the process for road course races over the last few years, and this season the Truck Series has used it at Pocono and will again use it at Kentucky this weekend. CBS Sports reported on Thursday that NASCAR may be considering implementing multi-car qualifying for both the NNS and Cup Series on a regular basis. Is anyone else wondering why?
It appears that the main reason this system would be adopted by all the NASCAR series is to speed up the qualifying process. That’s fine, but I didn’t realize there was a problem with how quickly qualifying happened. This appears to me as something that isn’t necessarily broken, but NASCAR wants to fix it anyway.
Personally, my biggest objection with the multi-car qualifying idea is how fair this would be for everyone involved. We’ve seen plenty of times in other forms of racing where one driver’s bonzai qualifying lap was ruined by another driver in the name of strategy. With so much at stake, and the measures that teams go to in terms of finding an advantage, it isn’t crazy to think that this could happen in NASCAR. Single car qualifying runs eliminate any possibility of tampering by another team.
On top of that, what if a driver blows an engine while qualifying, and the other driver on track drives into the oil left behind and wrecks their primary car? A team could potentially have their weekend ruined before the race even starts. How is that fair? Under the system we have now, this would never happen, because NASCAR has the ability to clean the track in between qualifying runs.
With the current state of the sport I realize that NASCAR is trying to find ways to improve the racing and get more people to not only attend races, but also to watch on TV. To me though, implementing multi-car qualifying will cause more problems then it actually fixes.
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