by Darrell Waltrip

My brother calls me "old school" all the time, "old fashioned" and "old timer," but here's my problem. I'm just having trouble buying into all of the changes that keep being made to our sport. If something isn't broken, you're not supposed to work on it until it is, but from politics to racing to life in general, that's what I see happening every day. All you have to do is say you're going to make changes, and everybody gets all excited. You don't even have to define what the changes are going to be. You just say, "Well, we don't like the way things are, and we're going to change them." Everybody says, "Great! I can't wait to see what the changes are going to be!" Over the last three years, that's what has happened to NASCAR.

BlogJam ... Call him old school if you want, but Darrell Waltrip is sick of all the changes going on in his beloved sport. Do you agree, disagree? Here's your chance to voice your opinion. Ordinal out of range Also... Surprises of 2006 Storylines of 2006

In no way am I directing anything derogatory toward NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France, but when he took over, he had it in his mind that he was going to start making a lot of changes. The first thing that NASCAR did was end the practice of racing back to the caution. They started freezing the field. It was a whole new look, something that we had never done before. In all the years I had been racing, the start/finish line was God. Everything was said, done or monitored in relation to the start/finish line. All of the sudden, it wasn't our point of reference anymore.

They started talking about lines in the track. They started freezing the field, determining the running order and, in some cases, even who won the race by lines in the track that I couldn't even see. That bothered me. I don't want my guy racing his heart out all day and then find out he wasn't ahead of somebody when they crossed some line that I can't see. Again, I'm accustomed to the start/finish line being my point of reference.

They decided they were going to start freezing in the interest of safety. It all made sense, but when you freeze the field, the first thing somebody says is, "Well, hey man, if I'm a lap down, now I can't get a lap back. If I beat the leader back to the line, I used to get a lap back." Well, they said, "We're going to fix that for you. Every time a caution comes out, the first driver a lap down gets that lap back." On NASCAR on FOX broadcasts, we started calling it the "free pass," and then it got to be known as the "lucky dog." Recently, I've even heard it called "the beneficiary." In the past, drivers had to work to get a lap back. One of the most exciting parts of a race was a guy getting a lap down and then racing with the leader, trying to beat him back to the start/finish line when the caution came out. Occasionally, it looked a little dicey, but it kept you on the edge of your seat. It was just part of our sport. It's what we had always done. It was tradition, but they changed it and came up with the "lucky dog."

Now, the field is frozen, and we know where everybody is running. We've got this new scoring system with little black-box monitors on the cars as they cross these lines in the track. And, oh, by the way, while we're at it, we're going to put some of those lines into pit lane. Now, NASCAR can monitor pit-lane speed. I'm all in favor of keeping it fair for everybody, but if I'm speeding on pit road, I'd like to see my speed. As a fan, I'd like to know exactly how fast my driver was going. If the speed limit is 35 mph, was he going 36, 38 or 40? And where did he get it? Give me something that I can look at, put my arms around and identify with so I don't have to sit there and wonder what happened and how it happened.

So now, we've got this all figured out. We've got the field frozen, and we know where everybody is. Pit-road speed is monitored. These are all things that are a little bit different than what we've done in the past. Since we're not racing back to the caution anymore, I guess that eliminates any red-flag situation because we had another little bit of a change. We're going to have a green-white-checkered finish. Fans wanted to see the races end under green and get annoyed about it ending under caution. NASCAR decided that we wouldn't finish any more races under caution. Now, there was no need to stop the cars on the race track because we're going to run those last two laps under the green... at least that's what I thought.

Now, every time I turn around, they're stopping the cars on the track. I understand they're trying to do as many green-flag laps at the end as they can, but races were not meant to be interrupted. That's the problem I have with debris cautions. We run 30 or 40 laps and get a caution for debris. At some race tracks, you've got a little, 13-gallon fuel cell. You run 30 or 40 laps, and you've got to pit for gas. There are too many off-track distractions that are taking away from the flow of races. Fans pay to see 400, 500 or 600 miles of racing, but I've heard some people say the races are too long. The races aren't too long; they just take too dadgum long to run. I don't know what's wrong with these cars. We didn't used to have debris flying off of them like these guys do today. Spring rubbers ought to be outlawed. They just stick them in the spring, and the first thing you know, one of them falls out. NASCAR's got to throw a caution to pick it up. There are just way too many cautions and interruptions. That's one of the things that's hurting our audience at home. Things are going on that they can't understand. There are too many unnecessary caution flags. It's hurting the flow of the race.

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Then there's the ultimate change of all with the Car of Tomorrow in 2007, and it's a whole new animal. The thing that bothers me most about the Car of Tomorrow is the learning curve. We've basically had 50 years of racing a car that's very similar to what we have today. We've changed the bodies a number of times, but we haven't changed the chassis since 1981 so we have years and years of experience. I've seen cars take horrendous hits this year and a couple of Busch cars that were just destroyed. With all of the new safety devices like the HANS, seats and SAFER Barriers, the guys are feeling pretty invincible these days, and rightfully so. The drivers were feeling quite confident about their cars this year, but now they've got to get out of this car and start driving something without any experience.

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They don't know what's going to happen to the COT when it slams into the wall at 180 mph because nobody's ever done it. They don't know what's going to happe when they get it out there and start racing it. Here comes an Impala with a splitter and a wing. It sounds like something a teenager might have done to the family car, for Pete's sake. I'm not a big advocate of the Car of Tomorrow. It's a costly change that's going to affect the racing and the teams, but I'm more concerned about a lack of experience with this car. We've got to go through a learning curve. We've been dealing with the same car for a long time, and it's going to take a long time to switch over the feedback, information and knowledge that we have from the old car to this new one.

There have just been too many changes, and they've happened too fast. We've taken a sport that has a strong tradition and a great heritage with loyal fans that follow the sport and understand it, and we've complicated it and made so many rules that a guy at home sits around all day long trying to figure out what we're talking about and what we're doing. We've made some rules of unintended consequences — rules that seemed good on paper — but when you start to implement them, it creates other situations like the "lucky dog," freezing the field and not racing back to the caution. There are others, but those are the ones that really changed the way we watch a race.

I also think fans are not happy about the Chase. It's changed the way we crown a champion. We've had too many changes, too fast, and it's affected the way people watch our sport and what people think about our sport. I know that we want to continue to grow it, but you can't make changes just for the sake of making changes. Fans don't come to see officials officiate; they come to see racers race. I say let 'em race.