KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
BROOKLYN, Mich. -- Matt Kenseth can't help wondering. What's the point?
Last year, he enjoyed a breakout season on the NASCAR Winston Cup Series, winning five times. But he crashed too often. Parts broke. His third-year team made mistakes in strategy.
Kenseth finished eighth in the championship, and nobody -- not the driver, not his crew, no one else in the series -- realistically thought Kenseth deserved to be the champion.
But this season, Kenseth and his Roush Racing crew have found the sort of consistency they desired. Their cars have been fast and reliable. Kenseth has finished no worse than 22nd and has accumulated as many top-five finishes as anyone else and more top-10s in the first 23 races.
By contending week after week on the demanding circuit and winning once, the 31-year-old racer from Cambridge, Wis., has built his lead in the series standings to a commanding 329 points over Dale Earnhardt Jr.
So what's the big topic of discussion lately? Changing the scoring system.
Even NASCAR Chairman Bill France Jr. weighed in recently, commenting to USA Today that an alteration might be needed so the series doesn't "have the championship decided every year by July."
"Either way, sometimes, you can't win," Kenseth said. "If you win five, you didn't run well enough in the rest of them. If you run well and win one, then you didn't win enough."
What the driver and his team find most humorous in the discussion is the fact that none of the other top contenders has won a significant portion of the races, either. The rest of the top five -- Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick and Michael Waltrip -- have exactly the same number of victories as Kenseth.
Sixth-place Jimmie Johnson has won twice, but he has only half as many top-10s as Kenseth and he has finished 25th or worse four times. Ryan Newman leads the series with five victories, including last Sunday at Michigan International Speedway, but has failed to finish five, as well, and sits eighth in the standings.
"We've had more second-place finishes, we've had more top-10s, we've had more top-fives," Kenseth said. "We haven't just been more consistent by finishing and not having terrible days. We have better average finishes, too.
"It's not the point system's fault that the cars are so competitive. There are so many rules, so many regulations that these races go for strategy and it's hard to go win four, five, six races in a year."
The main complaint leveled against the point system used by NASCAR since 1975 is that winning isn't rewarded enough.
A first-place finisher earns 175 points, and the payout decreases by five points per position to sixth, by four from seventh to 11th and by three through the rest of the field. Additionally, five points are awarded to any driver leading a lap and five more to the driver who leads the most laps.
"What bothers me is, say you win the race, and the second place guy who leads the most laps gets the same amount of points," said Gordon, a four-time series champion. "I think there needs to be some separation there. Five, 10, I don't know.
"But we run the system the way it is, and I think the points system in Winston Cup racing is one of the most difficult to win. When you get your hands around that trophy, you know you've earned it and worked really hard at it. It's very prestigious and I don't want to do anything to tarnish it."