Finally, a NASCAR season without major changes

After years and years of changing nearly every aspect of the sport, NASCAR believes the 2011 season went well enough that everything will be pretty much the same for 2012.

Thankfully, during this year’s preseason media tour NASCAR officials didn’t announce any big changes to the points system or schedule, and it didn’t any issue mandates on how drivers should act.

Sure, the cars will run new electronic fuel injection engines, but that likely won’t create a noticeable difference in the racing.

Beyond that, the cars, points system, schedule and rules will be nearly exactly the same as last season, and that is a very good thing.

NASCAR has always been a sport that embraces change, but it really kicked the changes into high gear during the last decade.

Since 2000, the sport has brought in new tracks while eliminating others from the schedule, it has a different car model, a playoff format, new title sponsors in all three national touring series and a new points system, just to name a few.

Back when NASCAR started to make all of these changes, the sport was still growing in popularity and gaining more and more fans each year. Much of the talk at the time was how to make changes to the sport to continue to bring in new fans.

So, NASCAR dove in head first to making changes to spice up the sport. The competition changes began with the introduction of the Chase format in 2004 and ended with the double-file restarts that began in mid-2009.

In between, rules such as the Lucky Dog, wave-arounds and green-white-checkered finishes crept into the sport.

Now, not all of those changes are bad, and the sport will still be exciting and fun to watch regardless of the rules NASCAR puts together. The biggest problem with the changes was the amount of changes that happened in a relatively short period of time.

During that time, some fans simply became fatigued from all of the changes and decided to throw their hands up and skip out completely. It would likely take several races for a fan from 10 years ago to understand how the sport works these days.

It is difficult in any sport to build a fan base when the sport changes so much.

Yes, some fans go to races just for the experience of watching 43 racecars charge around the track at the same time, but a lot of fans have a passion for the sport that goes deeper than the simple sights and sounds of a race.

They want to understand what is happening in all aspects of the sport, from the drivers personalities to how the cars work to how teams prepare for a race, as well as the strategy involved throughout the event.

Unfortunately, the changes of the past decade have made it difficult for even the most die-hard fans to keep up.

The sport would likely be just fine if many of these changes had never been made. The sport survived for 50 or so years before everything changed, and it would have survived without them. There will always be a market for stock car racing, even though the size of that market could surely be debated for years.

NASCAR may have made more money during the 2000’s in part because of some of its changes, but it also shook up the fan base.

The only changes that absolutely had to be made were the introduction of the SAFER barriers at all tracks and the Car of Tomorrow. As much as people hated the look of the car, it has saved several drivers from serious injuries or worse. Plus, NASCAR will fix the ugly problem next year with the new 2013 car models.

For those who liked last season, get ready for what NASCAR hopes is more of the same.

For many, just having the same rules for two consecutive years will be a welcome experience.

New schedule playing out well

The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series took a collective breather this weekend as everybody came down from the high that has been the past month or so in NASCAR.

Every year people say this is the most exciting start to a season they can remember, but maybe they just have terrible memories. Can anyone honestly say any of the five years the series went to California for the second race of the season was anywhere close to exciting? No. Daytona may have been exciting, but that’s where it ended.

Truthfully, the Speedweeks for the past several years have been amazing and have ended with great finishes in the 500. But, the letdown fans may have felt this weekend used to happen in the second week of the season, and often those races at California were followed by an off week. Talk about a perfect setup to kill any early season excitement.

However, NASCAR drastically improved the beginning of the season’s schedule this year. Another great Daytona 500 was followed by an intense race at Phoenix that included a duel between Jeff Gordon and Kyle Busch that ended with Gordon punting Busch out of the way for the win. Sure, Vegas may have been a bit of a letdown as far as the racing was concerned, but more often than not Vegas produces some very good racing. Plus, things will get even better next year if fans can wait an extra week for the season to start, because moving the Daytona 500 a week later will eliminate this off week.

NASCAR also couldn’t have asked for any better storylines in the first three weeks of the season. Rookie Trevor Bayne won the first and biggest race of the season, the Daytona 500, and was followed the next week by a win from Jeff Gordon, the longtime star of the sport who has fought whispers he might be coming into the latter stages of his career. With the two polar opposites of the sport covered age-wise, the championship contender in the prime of his career, Carl Edwards, won the race at Las Vegas.

In past years, the major players were usually defined at this point in the season. This is the first season since 2007 that has had three different winners in the first three races, and in prior years when there were three different winners, somebody jumped up and won another couple of races right away. Edwards, Jimmie Johnson and Kyle Busch have all stunk up the show early on in a season before.

It will be interesting to see what happens this time around. Kyle Busch has been a factor in every race so far, but he has had the kind of luck that usually finds him once the Chase rolls around. He’s good at Bristol, though, so maybe he will pick up an early victory right away, but that would still give us another different winner this season.

In any case, it is difficult to find reasons why NASCAR isn’t finally on an upswing, and unless somebody finds a way to dominate several of the upcoming tracks, which could prove difficult because they include every different type of track the series visits, from half-miles to two-and-a-half-miles and everything in between.

With the way the schedule is set up this season, it’s possible we won’t know the favorites for the championship until the All-Star Race in May. If we do know by then, those contending teams will have definitely earned their spot in the standings.