Pointing toward the championship

By Richard Petty, Special to Turner Sports Interactive
August 15, 2001
9:23 AM EDT (1323 GMT)

I won't go as far as to say he has the thing locked up, but betting against Jeff Gordon to win the NASCAR Winston Cup championship this year probably wouldn't be the smartest thing you could do either.

He has a 194-point lead. That’s more than a race over everybody else. The most points you can get for one race is 185 -- and that is by winning and leading the most laps. So even if he sat out this week at Michigan, he would still be leading the points going into Bristol.

At this time of the year, sitting out a race probably wouldn't be a good thing for Jeff to do -- and I don't think those boys are even considering that. They are looking to win more races and to wrap this championship up as soon as they can.

I've heard people say the points system puts too much emphasis on consistency and not enough on winning. Towards the end of the year, that is probably true. But for the rest of the year, every race team’s emphasis is on winning, and nothing else.

Back when my daddy, Lee Petty, was running what was then called Grand National, there wasn't hardly any emphasis on points. Everything was on winning races. The money came if you won the race. Points didn't mean much of anything. The championship was nice but for a race team business, it wasn't as big of a deal.

To tell you the truth, even if points had been a big deal, I don't know what anybody would have done. NASCAR went through seven or eight different points systems, and nobody was ever able to really figure out how the thing worked. These days, you finish a race and you have an idea of how that race helped you or hurt you in the points. Back then, you could win the race and you still weren't sure.

When R.J. Reynolds came along and they put together a program where there was a lot of money -- and a lot of prestige -- to winning the championship, points became a bigger and bigger deal.

As the championship became a bigger deal to three or four teams, all of the sudden it became a bigger deal to a lot more teams. And it’s grown since then too. There is a tremendous amount of attention paid to the championship now -- more than there is for some races.

A stable points system helped a lot too. Joe Whitlock and Phil Holmer got together and led a group that put together the current system. Whitlock has passed away, but he was the PR guy for NASCAR in the early 70's.

Phil Holmer is a muckety-muck at Goodyear now but he was the PR guy for Daytona International Speedway in the early 70's.

It’s still not the easiest thing to follow but there is some stability to it. Win the race and you get 175 points. Second place is 170 points, and it drops by five points for each finishing position through sixth, which is worth 150 points.

Then it drops in four-point increments through 11th place, and three point increments the rest of the way through the field. If you lead one lap, you get a maximum of five bonus points. If you lead the most laps in the race, you get a maximum of five more bonus points.

So win the race -- 175 points -- and lead the most laps -- five points for leading one lap and five more for leading the most laps -- and the most points you can get for one race is 185.

Hard to follow in a sense, but you can still gauge how you did against somebody else.

If I won the race, led the most laps and the other guy finished 20th, then I picked up a bunch of points on him (82, if the car did not lead a lap). If I finished fourth and he finished fifth and neither one of us led, well, I didn't make up that many points.

It gives you a measuring stick anyway -- until you go over and look at the points sheet they had out after the race which tells you exactly.

So Ol’ Jeff is looking pretty good right now but he knows these things are won one race at a time. That’s the way this points system was set up, and it’s been a pretty good one. If he can be up by 194 points going into the last race of the season at Atlanta, yeah, he’s in pretty good shape. Until then, he is going to have to race for it.

Get the point?