NASCAR enacting more changes, but is that a good thing?

NASCAR’s decision Tuesday to unveil an elimination championship format in its lower national divisions was no spur of the moment announcement, but rather something the sanctioning body had been contemplating since at least the fall when trial balloons were floated publicly.

Wanting uniformity across the Sprint Cup, Xfinity and Camping World Truck series, and the guarantee a championship battle goes all the way to the final race of the season was too enticing a prospect for NASCAR to resist. Though the knockout Chase is controversial, it has produced as intended with the last two Cup champions, Kyle Busch and Kevin Harvick, earning their respective titles by winning the final race of the year.

“When we look at how successful the format is for the Sprint Cup Series and the fact that the drivers trying to win a championship in those lower divisions are trying to come up to the Sprint Cup Series, we know that the way to win in the future, you’ve got to beat people,” NASCAR CEO and chairman Brian France said. “You’ve got to be winning. You’ve got to be in the crosshairs of elimination at any moment, and that’s how we want our young drivers from a very early stage to understand the racing competitive style in NASCAR.

“So no better way to do that than to have our championship formats consistent, and that’s one of the main reasons I think that I know that we did that.”

Yet, despite the sound reasoning, the mechanics and the actual execution creates doubt whether the elimination format will have the same success in the feeder series.

Both Xfinity and Trucks feature an abundance of teams lacking the resources of the upper echelon teams. That disparity manifests itself in myriad ways, most pronounced in the dearth of competitiveness where the top of the grid considerably outperforms the bottom.

Using the Xfinity formula rolled out Tuesday, the 12-driver Chase field would have featured one title contender last year, Jeremy Clements, who recorded all of one top-10 finish and just eight times completed the same number of laps as the leader. Is that someone deserving of racing for a championship? And doesn’t a title lose a tinge of luster if it comes by way of a water-downed format comprised of career journeyman and backmarkers?

“As a fan, I think it’s great,” said Erik Jones, the defending Truck Series champion who is advancing to Xfinity full-time in 2016. “But as a driver, and for our team, it hurts us a little bit. As consistent and strong as I think we could be throughout the whole year, I feel like we definitely had a good shot of locking up [the championship] by Homestead, or at least being in a very good position at Homestead. Now, that’s kind of out the window.”

If the goal of implanting a Chase is to ensure a compelling title race, then NASCAR accomplished that goal.

Except at what cost? Because among those already alienated by a Cup format they feel rewards not the best driver over the course of an entire season, that ire will only intensify.

The sport has undergone a nearly innumerable amount of change since the turn of the century, everything from the Chase and its various incarnations to an overhauled schedule to a different points system to knockout qualifying and so on and on. For many, it has become too much. The NASCAR they once adorned has morphed into a caricature where the spirit of a legitimate contest is tested by continual attempts to juice a bland on-track product.

And the changes did not stop with the Chase format Tuesday. Going forward, Truck Series races will now feature a “caution clock” where, after 20 minutes of green-flag action, a competition caution will come out to tighten the field via restarts, which as of late is often where the majority of passing occurs.

One upshot is the automatic cautions will likely reduce debris yellows and with it, the debate of whether debris was actually on the track or NASCAR was merely looking for a reason to generate excitement. If the clock concept proves effective, it is not farfetched to think it could eventually be implemented Cup.

And that would mean change. And while not all change is necessarily bad, too much can often be overwhelming. A juncture NASCAR may be reaching.