Budweiser Shootout Format Changes...Again

Earlier this week, NASCAR announced that for the second year in a row, there will be a new format for selecting drivers to compete in the Budweiser Shootout. This time, drivers will be selected based on a number of eligibility factors.

First, the 2009 Chase participants are to be entered in the race. Next, any past series champions are eligible who have raced in the past two seasons, including any driver who has won either a previous Budweiser Shootout or any points paying race at Daytona. Finally, Joey Logano will be in the race because he won the 2009 Rookie of the Year award.

So, what does this all mean? Well, rarely do the non-points events have the same rules from year to year, but now the format of how to choose the drivers is the part of the race that is changing. I understand that Budweiser no longer wanted to have the previous season’s pole winners in the race because Coors Light now sponsors the pole award. But, that move was what kicked off another downward spiral for this race.

Winning the pole now means nothing more than starting at the front of the field and having the chance to select the first pit stall. I always felt that the Bud Shootout was special in the fact that it awarded drivers for something other than winning a race or even how their entire season had gone. In the past few years guys like Joe Nemechek would have to run partial schedules, but by qualifying well at a place like Talladega, they were able to run the Bud Shootout the following year. That is no longer the case.

Now this race is just like every other gimmick race in that it will have the same basic drivers year after year. For the most part the drivers in the Chase remain fairly consistent from year to year, and the past series champions will never change. I thought past champion eligibility was reserved for the All-Star race.

However, if we are going to go down this road, I do like the idea of having past Daytona winners entered in the race. Sometimes drivers who do well at Daytona and Talladega are different than those that are traditionally at the front of the field each week. But, overall this is just another case where corporate sponsorship got in the way of a good race.

Changing the format for the manufacturers last year was a bad idea that had no real staying power. Eventually a manufacturer was going to leave the sport or one would enter the sport. Either way, there would be a group of cars that were not as competitive as they should be for this race. To illustrate how bad an idea this was, only one year into the change, one of the manufacturers now has only three full-time cars in the series, thereby leaving open holes in the field.

So, once again, changes had to be made. But like many things in the sport over the last five years, if the first change had not been made, none of the following changes would have been necessary.