When Bubba Wallace climbed from his car after winning Sunday's Brickyard 400, he celebrated like someone who had finally reached a pinnacle they had been chasing their entire life. Wallace gave an impassioned interview and held his child up to the crowd like in the movie The Lion King before kissing the bricks, but it was not the only post-race victory celebration happening there that day. In the track's infield, Ty Gibbs was holding a trophy of his own... in honor of his 21st-place finish in the same race.
Gibbs was celebrating his victory in NASCAR's first-ever in-season tournament, a head-to-head competition inspired by a similar program added to the NBA's regular season two years ago. Like that prize, NASCAR's tournament is a promotional event meant to add stakes to an otherwise dull stretch of a long regular season. Unlike the NBA's tournament, however, the NASCAR one is not decided by the traditional rules of the sport.
Instead of a points system, NASCAR's In-Season Challenge champion is decided by head-to-head match-ups between pairs of drivers. Each of the 32 drivers in the bracket was seeded by their performance heading into the first round of the tournament last month. Drivers then went into every race with someone to beat. The top driver in a match-up would advance to the next round, leaving the loser out of contention for a million-dollar cash prize.
On paper, this format would create new drama to track over the course of five races. In practice, it devolved into complete nonsense almost immediately. The opening round was at Atlanta, now a unique 1.5-mile drafting track, and as NASCAR drivers so often do at drafting tracks, a huge chunk of the field wrecked early. That meant half the field was eliminated in a race where just 21 of 40 cars finished on the lead lap. It also meant that the 32nd and final seed, Ty Dillon, advanced by default after No. 1-seed Denny Hamlin crashed.
It would be the first in a string of unlikely advancements for Dillon, who currently sits 32nd in the championship standings. His next rival, Brad Keselowski, crashed in the opening laps of the race at Chicago. That let him advance with a finish of just 20th. At Sonoma, he nudged his new nemesis Alex Bowman out of the way on the final lap to advance from 17th. He spent the entire race at Dover fighting John Hunter Nemechek for the a spot in the championship match-up, and he eventually won that battle by just one spot: He finished 20th, Nemechek finished 21st.
If Dillon finished 20th again at Indianapolis, he would have won $1 million and the title of inaugural in-season challenge champion. He instead came home a disappointing 28th, handing the title to his fellow winless Cup Series driver, fellow grandson of a NASCAR team owner, and fellow Ty, Ty Gibbs. Dillon ended the run with an average finish of 18.6, good for 16th-best of all NASCAR Cup Series drivers during the in-season tournament window. He had just one top 15 finish in the entire stretch.
In other words, Dillon did not race well at all over the course of the in-season tournament and he still came within a single Ty Gibbs flat tire of winning the entire prize. It's a perfect illustration of the problem with head-to-head scoring for auto racing, a sport that is about any given single driver taking on the whole field at once.
NASCAR's arcane elimination playoff format is insulated against this kind of chaos by three-race rounds and playoff points that do not reset between cuts, but it is also prone to similar problems. Just last year, Joey Logano won the series championship with what might be the worst one-season resume of any series champion ever. Logano was not one of the top 10 drivers in the series by average finish or by points scored, but he ran his season with the format in mind, and won the final race to lock up a title anyway.
Dillon and Gibbs, on the other hand, got to their final match-up without ever winning a race over the course of the tournament. Over the course of the five-race bracket, only the tournament-opening Atlanta race was actually won by someone still fighting for the in-season challenge trophy.
NASCAR barely avoided a worst-case scenario of a downright bad winner, but the format's problems would have been clear whether 32-seed Ty Dillon or 1-seed Denny Hamlin claimed the trophy. In a sport where most teams are racing only to optimize their finish when points are counted, a head-to-head format doesn't really represent what is happening on track.
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