Nextel Cup keeps making big changes

Forget about your father’s NASCAR; this isn’t even last week’s laundry’s NASCAR anymore. Things are moving fast these days in one of America’s fastest-moving sports.

As the 2006 Nextel Cup season begins, there are 40 teams that clearly appear to have the wherewithal to run all 36 races this season. Exactly half of those teams are either new or have different drivers than they had for the majority of the 2005 season.

In 2007, 16 races are now scheduled to be run with a completely different kind of race car than teams use today. About the same number of races will be shown on ESPN or ABC for the first time since 1999. All of them will have Toyotas in the starting lineup. And the series itself, almost certainly, will change names – thanks to Nextel’s merger with Sprint.

Can’t anything just stay the same anymore? Well, there certainly are a few things that ought to.

Take for instance, the way the Nextel Cup – or Sprint Cup, or whatever Cup – schedule begins and ends. We’re done with the whole question about why NASCAR starts its season with its biggest event, the Daytona 500. Since the coming of the Chase for the Nextel Cup, which focuses incredible attention on the season’s final 10 races, it makes more sense than ever to kick things off with the richest and most prestigious race of the year.

It also makes sense to end the year in Florida, but not back in Daytona as some have suggested. There’s already one restrictor-plate track, Talladega, in the Chase, and it would overemphasize that form of competition to have two plate races in the Chase.

If you wanted to move, say, the Allstate 400 at Indianapolis to July 4 weekend and slide the second Daytona back about six weeks, we’d have no qualms with that. But the season-ending weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway, with the Busch and Truck series ending their seasons there, too, is becoming what a finale ought to be. In five years, it’ll seem completely illogical to mess with that.

And while we’re looking at the schedule, let’s get a couple of other things straight.

First, hands off Martinsville. The track has two Cup dates and ought to keep them both from now on. Yes, Martinsville, Va., is a “small market.” NASCAR longs to be loved in big cities like New York and Los Angeles. But the sport simply can’t turn its back on its roots, and Martinsville is an important part of that.

So, too, is Darlington. The Southern 500 still should be on Labor Day weekend there, but Darlington also is making its Mother’s Day eve date work for it, too. We’ll make a deal: Announce that Darlington’s place on the Cup schedule isn’t going anywhere for at least a decade, and we’ll stop obsessing on Labor Day.

Then there’s the NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge. In all of the years there’s been talk about moving it out of Lowe’s Motor Speedway, nobody has come up with a reason why that makes the slightest bit of sense. Sure, other tracks would like to have another chance to sell tickets, but away from Charlotte, the all-star race is just a race that doesn’t count. It certainly makes absolutely zero sense to ask teams to travel to Kansas or anywhere else to run the “Open” qualifying race. Leave well enough alone.

With 35 teams guaranteed starting spots in each Cup race, qualifying has taken a hit in recent years, too. It’d be better if the top six positions paid Nextel Cup points – 10 for the pole, five for second, four for third and so on. But if anybody ever comes up with the idea of just lining the cars up on points and doing away with qualifying altogether, let’s hope nobody listens.

Finally, let’s hope that NASCAR doesn’t get so impressed with itself that it thinks it doesn’t “need” manufacturers like Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota and, quite likely coming soon, Honda.

For years, I’ve thought about the logical end game for where stock-car racing was heading with is move toward “common” templates that make all of the cars look nearly indistinguishable. The marketing guys from Ford are going to tell you all year long how distinctive the Fusion is, but if you painted Dale Jarrett’s Ford Fusion like Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s Chevrolet Monte Carlo, there’d be only five fans in a hundred who’d notice the difference.

If NASCAR could get away with it, it’d not only decide what the car everybody raced looks like, it’d make those cars, sell them to the teams and pocket that money. And if the money from the manufacturers ever dries up, the “car of tomorrow” is a frighteningly big step down that road.