NASCAR has its best final four field yet. Does anyone care?
Three of the four drivers racing for the 2018 Cup Series championship in Sunday’s season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway already have championships to their name. The fourth is a driver who has made the final round in three of the last five seasons and who strung together six-straight top-10 finishes in the 2018 playoffs.
Two of the three champions enter the race with eight wins this season. The other champion, who won the title in 2017, has four wins in 2018, his second-highest season total. Oh, he’s got some beef with the only guy who isn’t a champion, too, based on the way a race played out a few weeks ago.
Does anyone care?
A few years ago, a question from a major media outlet related to any of the details in the first two paragraphs would have been the first thing asked at NASCAR’s annual championship media day. Yet after Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick, Joey Logano and Martin Truex Jr. got settled into their seats Thursday afternoon, the first question came via an obscure website and asked each of the four drivers about the level of support they’ve received from their families in the days leading up to the race.
Welcome to NASCAR in 2018. The season’s action on the track hasn’t been able to keep fans from finding something else to watch and has been overshadowed by nearly every development off the track. So it was fitting that the news conference to kick off NASCAR’s final weekend of the season began with the most banal and trivial of non-racing-related inquiries.
Yeah, it would have been big news if one of the drivers said his family didn’t care about cars going in circles and had no interest in what happened on Sunday. But come on, that’s not going to happen in any sport or series, let alone one as dependent on sponsorship money as this one.
From a racing perspective, NASCAR has arguably the best final four field its ever had. Busch, Harvick, Logano and Truex have combined to win 22 of the season’s 35 races. No other group of contenders has entered the finale with more than 17 wins.
Busch, Harvick and Truex have been exceptionally good at intermediate tracks like Homestead-Miami Speedway too. Just four races on tracks between 1.33 and 2-miles in length have been won by other drivers. While Logano’s two wins this season have come on a superspeedway and a short track, his average finish at the three 1.5-mile tracks in the playoffs so far has been fifth.
There’s a great chance that all four drivers will be running in the top five or even the top four for an extended period of time on Sunday. NASCAR’s streak of its champion winning the winner-take-all final race looks likely to extend to a fifth season.
The ingredients are there for a tantalizing finale for the NASCAR fans that still do care.
Last week’s race at Phoenix was the least-watched race at the track in at least 18 years. Over 1.7 million fewer people watched the race last week than did four years ago and it was the 26th of 31 regularly-scheduled races in 2018 to “to hit an all-time or decade-plus low,” according to Sports Media Watch.
Sunday’s race will probably continue the trend of terrible ratings. The 2017 finale at Homestead had 1.4 million fewer viewers than the race did in 2016 despite it being Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s final Cup Series race. No matter how awesome Sunday’s finale is, a slog of a transition year like 2018 isn’t going to create a ratings bump if a sendoff for Dale Freaking Junior couldn’t lead to one. Even if NASCAR and NBC have desperately tried to convince casual fans to tune in on Sunday
The four drivers appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show where they raced remote control cars and appeared on Thursday morning’s Today Show that included a segment where the four were on the beach in casual wear and with a table of food in front of them.
Those segments with no direct tie-in to what’s happened on the track in 2018 are fitting for the season. In no particular order, the news that Truex’s team was shutting down at the end of the season because of the loss of a sponsor, CEO Brian France’s arrest for DWI, Monster’s announcement that it wasn’t returning as title sponsor after 2019, NASCAR’s bid for track owner ISC, the news the France family could be looking to sell at least part of NASCAR, and inspection-related issues have all overshadowed the actual races at various points.
So has the announcement of sweeping changes to the cars for 2019. The type of racing that happens on Sunday will disappear in 2019 as the series introduces rules to artificially bring the cars closer together at intermediate tracks.
A goal of those changes? To get people to care about what’s happening on the track again. But February is a long time from now. There’s a pretty big race between now and then.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
