There's something wrong with a so-called sport that holds its Super Bowl as the first race of the season, and then feels the need to end with a hybrid: a "playoff" scheme overlaid onto the tail end of the regular season. While it's regular season is still going on, NASCAR arbitrarily designates the last 10 races as a "playoff." It locks out competitors from improving their regular season position in the last 10 races of the regular season.
On top of that, in a sport that supposedly prizes consistency over the entire 36-race regular season above all other qualities, NASCAR proceeds to arbitrarily penalize the teams that showed the most consistency over the first 26 races of the regular season. Equally arbitrarily, it also rewards teams whose lack of consistency left them as much as 400 points out of first, by wiping away their deficit for no reason other than to manufacture a tight points battle.
Then, just to make sure cup racing is now WWF with wheels, and to drive home the point that winning races in NASCAR means nothing, the team that won three times more races than any other during the precious chase still didn't win the championship. And the team that won the most points -- meaning it was most consistent -- over the entire 36 races didn't win the championship.
So NASCAR's championship is no longer about consistency. It was never about winning the most races. Now it's about being the most consistent and lucky over a 10-race span.
NASCAR should finish their season, declare a champion and then have a post-season, three race "Race-Off". In the weeks before the banquet in New York, take the top 10 and have a short track race, a 1-1/2 mile race and a restrictor plate race for cash only. Kind of like the IROC series only in Official Nextel Cup cars and have a format similar to the Winston, er, I mean that all-star, whatever the heck they call it now race. Heck, make them draw for NASCAR supplied cars in different colors... except Kurt Busch. Kurt Busch gets the pink car.