Ever since they strayed away from the old 50 lap, 20 lap, followed by a 10 lap shootout format, they have been trying to chase something unobtainable...perfection. They had tried everything; from a survival of the fastest format, and a format to try to make it like football with 4 quarters of 20 laps segments. All seemed to fail, except the format that came out this year I thought showed a lot of promise. The format was a 90 lap race having a caution every 20 laps and on the 4th caution all the teams would have to pit with the 4 segment winners leading the way onto pit road. This way it would add the element of the pit crews to the race, but one thing was wrong with this, NASCAR didn't force teams to take tires on the final caution so all it was, was a 25 car stop and go pass through.
Some might think, whats wrong with that? Well if you watched the race you would find out how anticlimactic from how it could of been. With NASCAR not forcing teams to pit the drivers who won the first 3 segments were in the cat bird seat, they could pit on the 3rd caution take it easy for the last 20 lap segment and be out front of drivers behind who just ran their asses off to try to be the winner of the 4th segment. As I stated before, because of that the last 10 lap shootout was a dud. In an All Star race that had so much exciting side by side racing (for once) throughout the field for the first 80 laps of the event, when they took the restart for the final 10 laps things got spread out very quickly. This was the exact opposite of how an All Star Race should be.
Next year for the All Star Race they need to make another minor change to the race, and that is to require every team to make AT LEAST a two tire pit stop. Therefore actually adding importance of the pit crews and making it more of an equal playing field to set up an exciting 10 lap shootout. If they do this, I think it will be the closest thing to being perfect.
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