It's Not Fair

February 15, 1998, 3:09 PM. At the Daytona 500, with 170,000 fans in attendance, the crowd is on their feet, cheering at the top of their lungs as a Daytona-winless Dale Earnhardt takes turn 4 and crosses the finish line in first place… going roughly 60 miles per hour.

On that day, Earnhardt is leading with just two laps to go, when Lake Speed (contender for the best driver’s name ever) and John Andretti get into each other in turn 2 and both spin out, prompting a late-race caution. Dale makes it to the yellow flag first, freezing the field and effectively ending the race at lap 199. The pack slows from 190 mph, and Dale takes the checkered flag at a speed slow enough to get you the middle finger from a passing grandmother on a Texas highway.

Cut to the Sunday before last and a similar situation at the Phoenix Championship Race: In the 11 car, Denny Hamlin has led 208 of the race’s 319 laps. He’s in first place with three laps to go, and ahead of the nearest car — William Byron in the 24 — by over three seconds. Hamlin is three laps from his 61st Cup win, and as the highest-running car of the remaining four playoff drivers, his very first NASCAR Cup Championship. It’s then that William Byron’s right-front tire goes flat and the 24 hits the wall, prompting a late-race caution.

Now, in the age of Dale, this likely would have ended the whole thing, with Hamlin finishing the race that he dominated under caution. But today’s NASCAR can't quite conceive a marquee race ending without even the suggestion of some last-second chaos, so under the current rules, if caution comes out this late, but still before the last lap, the race ends in a two-lap overtime shoot-out in which the field bunches up in two lanes to restart. Before this, though: pit stops. Under caution, cars have the option to come in and make adjustments or take new tires, or to stay out entirely and leapfrog in the running order any cars who come in.

The lead car must make this decision first, without any idea as to what the rest of the field might do. Make the decision to come in, and you might lose any number of spots to cars who opt to stay out. Stay out, and the rest of the field might come in for fresh tires, leaving you in the position of restarting just to get railroaded by faster cars right behind you on newer treads. It’s the kind of anything-can-happen chaos that makes for a nail-biting finish that can be cut and slow-mo’d into a compelling promo the broadcast channel will replay for the entirety of the next season.

In the Phoenix race, the 11 team opts to bring Hamlin in for four fresh tires. Under caution, he loses nine spots to cars that choose to take just two tires or to stay out. Very importantly, one of these cars taking two tires is Kyle Larson, the only remaining playoff driver and championship contender who’ll restart ahead of Hamlin. At the green flag, Hamlin charges from tenth to sixth but can’t make up any more ground, and the race goes to Ryan Blaney. Kyle Larson finishes third, and as the highest finishing playoff driver of the championship race, he takes this year’s title as well.

Hamlin turns the engine off, removes his helmet, and stares blankly ahead.

What fans and commentators will opine on for the next week echoes the numbness of Hamlin’s unfocused gaze: the ending of this championship race felt very, very wrong.

Hamlin lost a race that he won.

If you're picking up on some semantic discomfort in that statement, it stems from competing ideas on what winning means in context. Winning as an action verb that involves outdriving the field and executing with skill to earn a win, or winning as an outcome that means being awarded the win by rule. And while I can hear the voices of every 90s movie coach caricature reminding me that “winners don’t whine about fair,” I’d argue that something in our minds very much wants those two definitions to align, and when they don’t, narrative gears catch and grind.

Now, in a sport where anyone’s screwup can ruin anyone else’s entire race, it’s not like a fair result is promised or even likely to occur. A driver dominating a race for hours only to lose the lead because another car spins out isn’t exactly rare. Losing a race that you won can happen in a thousand ways. You can blow a tire or an engine, or get wrecked out.

Some amelioration to the absurdity is available. In a thirty-something race season, luck both bad and good tends to work its way through the field. Lose a lead because a backmarker car managed to spin out and draw a caution one week, and the next you might find yourself getting to first place because three cars ahead of you ran out of gas. Also alleviating to some of the built-in quirks is an intricate and mostly unspoken system of self-policing and on- and off-track justice.  A certain level of grace can be given for “well that’s just racing” incidents, but wronged drivers might deliver a receipt in the form of a well-timed bump to your rear corner panel until you learn that not all rubbing is considered racing. Wreck a guy egregiously enough, you might just get punched, and while fans will generally accept that the victim in such incidents is allowed one retribution sucker punch, it’s universally understood that leaving your helmet on when you start a fight is weak sauce. If you’re well-liked in the garage, other drivers will give you little kisses with their cars when you win a race.

And if you pull clown shit on the track, a driver might have his dad physically fight you after a race. (Seriously, y’all, despite the criticism in this article, this is the best sport that has ever existed.)

These factors are mitigating but not negating, and plenty of logically-minded and justice-driven folks simply can’t watch NASCAR for its perceived arbitrary chaos. Many of them might prefer Formula One, its consistent penalties, and its predictable rules enforcement for that reason.

This is a mistake on several fronts. First and foremost, in Formula One, there is a next-to-zero chance that you’ll ever see anyone’s dad fight a driver, and... why are you even watching at that point? Add to that, through measures to create predictability, Formula One created a sport that’s… well, predictable. This season, four drivers on three teams have won every single race. Last season ended with wins split among just four teams, and in 2023, Max Verstappen won all but three races the entire season. There’s little narrative satisfaction to be had in a sport that doesn’t entertain even the possibility of an underdog win. And while F1 introduced spend caps in 2021 in an ostensible effort to even the field and promote fairness, the cap did little but ensure that the teams who’d been outspending everyone else for years could maintain the superiority of facilities and equipment that they’d already created. Watch F1, and you’ll be impressed by some of the top driving talent in the world. What you won’t be is surprised by the outcome.

Finally, F1 is just so very European. By contrast, the most European thing about NASCAR is the tendency of its fans to believe that Australian broadcaster Leigh Diffey is British and to get mad about it.

Formula One sacrificed entertainment for predictability, all but ensuring seasons would eternally follow a worn script where no one goes off-book. NASCAR on the other hand, has spent years sacrificing fairness for pandemonious entertainment. In 2004, the organization exchanged a points championship system that rewarded consistency for a playoff chase that valued wins above all else, ending in a single winner-take-all race. They added overtimes to ensure that races would rarely end under the yellow flag. The addition of cautions for stage-ends forces restarts, where wrecks are most likely to happen, and the high-downforce packages of 2019 amplified pack racing and crash frequency. NASCAR put their thumb on the chaos scale in a big way.

They didn’t need to.

Since its inception, the narratives that drive the sport have been crafted organically by its stars and embraced by fans as authentic. NASCAR never needed to manufacture drama in a sport rife with big personalities, feuds, heartbreak, and forty adrenaline junkies battling it out every Sunday at 150+ miles per hour.

The first problem NASCAR created by needlessly engineering narratives is one of authenticity. Place the contrived alongside the real, and people are bound to notice the difference. Turns out, a multi-billion dollar corporation is perhaps the worst purveyor of cool imaginable. “Do you like compelling stories, fellow kids?”

Take the organization’s consistent promotion of wrecks as a core attraction. NASCAR has increasingly spotlighted crashes in promos to lure casual viewers, even though wrecks have declined over the years due to safety advances.

But NASCAR fans (mostly) don’t like wrecks. They don’t like watching laps drone on under caution or holding their breath waiting for someone’s window net to come down while they try to spot movement in an upside down car. I used to get sick to my stomach every time I saw a car flip. It wasn’t until I watched Ryan Preece pirouette through the air ten times then climb out of his car without assistance or a single broken bone that I stopped tearing up and repeating “Is he okay? Is he okay? Is he okay?” every time.

Ironically enough, given the constant wreck promotion, reducing the potential for serious injury is one of the things the sport has gotten very right. After the on-track death of Dale Earnhardt in 2001, NASCAR mandated safety features like HANS devices, SAFER barriers, and chassis improvements. In the 2025 season, the most serious injury that occurred at the track across all NASCAR series was Connor Zilisch breaking his clavicle when he slipped on a window net climbing onto his car roof to celebrate a victory.

The most serious off-track injury was this sick burn his dad landed after the incident.

The second and more serious problem NASCAR created is that by using the system to try to compel story, they broke a rule that Rusty Guinn writes about in Scoreboard:

But that’s not true in a sport where the organization’s desire to create compelling narrative has the consequence of changing outcomes. NASCAR never needed to script the drama, but in the attempt, they managed to rob fans of the genuinely compelling narratives that were meant to exist alongside a sport rooted in competition rather than chaos.

Denny Hamlin came to Phoenix at forty-four years old as the winningest Cup driver to never win a championship, with a return-or-retire question still lingering in the air and a dying father who maxed out credit cards and took multiple mortgages out on his home to see his son get into NASCAR and is unlikely to get another chance to see his son take the title.

That’s a story. Arguably a better one than, “Season ended in an arbitrary reshuffle at the last minute in which the guy with the best car did not win, but at least they were going very fast when they crossed the finish line.”

The best stories in NASCAR have always written themselves.