Theresa from Oakville, Conn.: How do you feel about getting rid of Happy Hour, moving qualifying to Saturday morning and impounding the cars after qualifying at some tracks? I am new to this stuff, but I do enjoy watching racing. I do like this new points system a lot.
Darrell Waltrip: Impounding the cars is a good thing. If you've got a gear rule, you've locked in the top 35 drivers and you're impounding the cars after qualifying, all of those things make a lot of sense. It's a change from what we've done in the past. It'll take a little getting used to, just like the Chase for the Nextel Cup took a little getting used to. And some of us aren't used to the Chase yet.
You say you like the Chase, and I guess I've become rather neutral on the subject. I'm not going to say I'm all that much for it, and I'm not going to say I'm all that much against it. People say Richard Petty won the championship under different point systems. He did, but those systems counted all of the races for the entire season. They didn't break out 10 races to determine the champion. We've had some different point systems through the years, but they always counted all of the races. You didn't have a special 10-race shootout like we had this year.
I'll be watching with interest and curiosity just to see if the Chase for the Nextel Cup produces another exciting finish like it did in 2004. With past point systems, we had exciting finishes right down to the last lap, and we had some years when the title chase didn't go down to the last race. There's no guarantee that the current chase for the championship format is going to produce the same kind of results every year that it did in 2004 so the proof is in the pudding. If it creates that kind of excitement year in and year out, then I would say that it's a winner, and I would be happy about that.
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