ODD MEN OUT; In the new NASCAR points system, not everyone is a winner.(Motorsports)

Byline: BILL McGUIRE

What a boon for NASCAR. You can say the new Nextel Cup points system is too gimmicky, that it flouts tradition, or that you just plain don't like it. But you can't say the new format, with its 10-race, 10-driver championship round to cap the season and determine the champion, hasn't accomplished exactly what NASCAR intended, and beyond all expectations.

The new scheme has generated incredible fan excitement and media hype as the series heads into autumn, and head-to-head competition against football for the hearts, minds and television remotes of the sporting audience. In the offices just off International Speedway Drive in Daytona Beach, the wheels they are ever turning, turning.

After some initial resistance, the garage area has fallen in foursquare behind the ingenious new plan. The don't-call-it-a-playoff format places 10 drivers in the footlights and the headlines for the final championship battle, instead of the usual two or three. That's a great deal for everyone involved except perhaps for those teams, drivers and sponsors outside the top-10 after Richmond. Not that they suffer a genuine grievance under the new system, mind you. With the old system they would be also-rans as well. But it does raise some interesting questions. In the final 10 events there will be, in effect, two races going on simultaneously: one between the top-10 drivers for the Nextel Cup title, and another among the remaining 33 for-what? What are they racing for?

Rookie Brendan Gaughan has no hope of making the final cut, but says he is still pumped for the last 10 races. "It is technically a playoff,'' says Gaughan, a former Georgetown letterman in basketball and a hardcore stick-and-ball sports fan as well. "The only thing different in our sport is they don't send everyone else home. I think the rest of us are going to be the spoilers. It's not that we're going to go out there and hit people or anything like that. We still want our time, we still represent our sponsors. We still want to win, period. So even though I'm 30th in points I can still go win races. The best way to take points from somebody else is to go beat them. If [teammate] Ryan Newman makes the chase, the best way to help him is to win the race.''

Well, no. Actually, the best way for drivers out of contention to help their teammates would be to move over and let their teammates win, just as they are expected and even contracted to do in, say, F1. Some of your more cynical observers suggest the new championship format will encourage similar team orders in NASCAR. When we posed this possibility to Gaughan, Brian Vickers and Rusty Wallace, all drivers outside the top 10 but with teammates within the cut, we got exactly the same answer from each, verbatim: "This isn't F1.'' They insist there will be no such team orders.

Ricky Rudd, also locked out of the final chase, is just slightly less sure about that. "I can't answer that,'' says Rudd, who drives for the Wood Brothers, a single-car team but with close technical ties to Roush Racing. "I was with Hendrick in the early days of the big multi-team concept and you couldn't get the teams to talk to each other then, let alone work together. I don't know what it's like now. I do know things have changed a lot since then. We'll have to see how it all works out.''