How does NASCAR pick Nextel Cup winners?

I admit it, I haven't had much exposure to NASCAR racing, but I definitely have some friends who are obsessed with this particular flavor of auto racing. They aren't alone, either: 17 of the top twenty attended sporting events in the United States were NASCAR events, and there are an estimated 75 million fans who purchase over $2 billion in licensed products each year.

NASCAR, by the way, stands for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, and stock cars, as you might guess, are regular cars you and I could buy, rather than custom built racing cars with special engines, frames, seats, suspension, etc. At least, that's how it used to be. Nowadays it turns out that, as Wikipedia phrases it, "the similarities between Nextel Cup cars and actual production cars are limited to a small amount of shaping of the nose and grill areas."

And so we travel further down the rabbit hole of NASCAR. A "Nextel Cup car" is a NASCAR sanctioned car that runs in a variety of different races, 26 in a season, with the overall season sponsored by telecom company Nextel and called the Nextel Cup. Got it?

If that's not complex enough, let's talk about the point system for the series. Each driver who completes a race earns a specific number of points depending on where they place. The first place winner gets 180 points, the runner-up gets 170, third place is worth 165, fourth is 160, and so on. But it's not that easy. Places 2-6 are decremented by five points each, then 7th-11th drop four points per driver, and 12th place or lower decrements by 3 points.

Confusing, isn't it?

This means that the following table explains the per-race point score:

Phew, I don't understand this either, frankly, but if you take the best possible score and multiply it by the number of races in a season, you can see that the best possible season score is 180 * 26, or 4680. But wait, that's not all that's factored in.

Each time a driver leads a lap they get five additional points, and the driver who led the most laps in a race gets yet an additional five points.

Realistically, even the best NASCAR driver in the world can't lead every single race, so it's informative to note that 2005 NASCAR Nextel Cup winner Tony Stewart finished the season with 2202 points.

Does this all make sense to you?

According to NASCAR's Point System Explanation, the cumulative score the drivers get is just used to ascertain who is eligible for the "Chase", or more formally the Chase for the actual Nextel Cup itself.

When that race starts, the ten drivers with the highest seasonal scores are assigned new Chase scores, adjusted, so that the first place driver going into the Chase for the Nextel Cup has 5050 points, the second place driver has 5045, third has 5040, and so on. Then it's a matter of who can lead individual laps, and the final finish position of the drivers to ascertain who actually wins the Nextel Cup itself.

Anyway, I hope that helps explain a bit of the complex NASCAR scoring system for determining winning drivers. It's unquestionably an exciting sport, but I just have to figure that most of those 75 million fans pay attention to individual races and let the association figure out the statistics and cumulative scores!