No more red and white, now black and yellow

There are changes galore in NASCAR this year, including sponsors and colors.
By SHAV GLICK
LOS ANGLELES TIMES
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Change is the name of the game this year in NASCAR.
Nextel has replaced Winston as title sponsor of its premier stock car racing series; Brian France, 41, has succeeded his father, Bill Jr., 70, as chief executive; a controversial new point system is in place; Toyota is beginning its move to join the series, and the drivers' youth movement marches on. The most conspicuous change, though, is visual.
Driving through the tunnel into Daytona International Speedway, the new look is shocking. For the last 30 years, NASCAR tracks have been awash in red and white, Winston colors.
Black and yellow -- Nextel colors -- have taken over as the wireless communication company begins a 10-year sponsorship agreement with NASCAR.
Coincidentally, black and yellow are the colors of its champion's car, the No. 17 Ford driven by Matt Kenseth and sponsored by DeWalt Tools.
Only red now
The only red now is on some of the cars -- Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s No. 8 Budweiser, Jeff Gordon's No. 24 DuPont Finishes and Ricky Rudd's No. 21 Motorcraft, among others.
There might be some red faces, though, among upper-level NASCAR officials for their knee-jerk reaction to Kenseth's winning the final Winston Cup championship last year with only one race victory.
The system, dubbed "Chase for the Championship," essentially reduces the Daytona 500 and the first 26 of the 36 Nextel Cup races to qualifying events. After the first 26, the 10 points leaders will race for the more than $5-million champion's purse over the last 10 races.
Points from the first 26 races will not carry over. Instead, the leader will start with 5,050 points, the second-place driver with 5,045, and so on with incremental five-point drops through the contenders.
Driver reaction has been mostly negative.
"It's worse than I thought, because I at least felt if you had a 300-point lead going into the final 10 races, that they might knock that down to 100, but five points isn't really that big of a deal," Kenseth said.
Technically, one driver could win all 26 races and still start the "chase" with only a five-point lead to show for it.
Waltrip likes change
Michael Waltrip, winner of two of the last three Daytona 500s, likes the change.
"I think at the end of the year, the fans are going to like it," he said. "The media is going to love it because they're going to have more to talk about. When the fans and the media like it, eventually all the hard-headed drivers are going to like it and start praising it."
Greg Biffle, who won the Pepsi 400 at Daytona in July, has another perspective on the scoring system.
"It's going to change our sport more than anybody ever thought ... because sponsor packages are going to change and driver contracts are going to change," he said. "I will no longer have a 36-race contract. I'm going to have a 26-race contract and then a bonus 10-race contract. It may be as extreme as seeing people out of a job with 10 races to go, depending on whether or not your team makes the playoffs."
France insists there is no playoff.
"The first 26 races are a seeding process," France said. "What we're not going to call this is a playoff. It's not a single elimination. It is not a win or lose and you are out, not a best three of five. It's better than that because [in the end], it still has 10 tracks over 21/2 months to compete. We think we have something that's better than the playoffs."
The point system may be a debatable topic, but the change to Nextel has already paid dividends, opening areas of advertising and promotion that were denied when Winston, a cigarette maker, was the title sponsor.
"Look at the Super Bowl," said Waltrip. "Dale Jr. and I were in a commercial in the middle of the Super Bowl. That's something that [we] haven't been able to do in the past [because tobacco advertising is banned on TV]. I think there were 180 million people watching the Super Bowl and there Dale Jr. and I were, goofing off in the middle of it. Nextel is going to be a great partner to NASCAR racing."
The Nextel Cup season will get underway Saturday with the Budweiser Shootout, a non-point preview.
Like the season, the race is split in two parts. The first segment is 20 laps, followed by a 10-minute intermission. The second segment is 50 laps.
The 19 competing drivers are either pole winners from last season or previous winners of the race. The most intriguing is Boris Said, a road-racing specialist who won the pole at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., and has never raced on a high-speed oval.
"I can't wait for it to start," said the bushy-haired veteran who will be in the No. 01 U.S. Army Chevrolet. "I've been waiting for this since about five minutes after winning the pole at Infineon, knowing that I was going to be able to drive a Nextel Cup car at Daytona."