LOUDON, N.H. -- He won four Nextel Cup races, amassed a series-best 21 top-10s, led the standings for all but five weeks and took an almost insurmountable 317-point lead into the final race of NASCAR's regular season. Then Jeff Gordon saw one of the best campaigns in the sport's modern history washed away, leaving the driver lobbying for changes in the Chase system.

And NASCAR is listening.

Gordon's points lead, the largest at the end of the regular season in the now four-year existence of the circuit's 10-race playoff system, was wiped out last week when the 12-man field was set and the drivers seeded based on victories. So instead of carrying a 312-point lead over Tony Stewart into Sunday's event at New Hampshire International Speedway, he's 20 down to Jimmie Johnson -- who would be 410 points behind Gordon had the old system remained intact.

"If I didn't know what the rules were going into the season, I'd say we got the shaft," Gordon said. "But that's not the case. Ever since they've had the Chase, they've said what it is. This year they made the change to the 10 bonus points. It made the regular season more exciting. It made everybody push harder to get those wins. It did what it was supposed to do. But I do think they're going to have to revisit now, going back. If you're going to have incentives for guys to win races, you have to have some kind of incentive for a guy to go out there and be the points leader at that point. I wouldn't be surprised if they revisit that a little bit."

They will. Jim Hunter, NASCAR's vice president for corporate communications, confirmed that series brass are exploring ways to tweak the Chase to provide the points leader after the first 26 races with some kind of bonus. Whether that's a regular-season championship of some sort or a points bump, no one is sure. But options are being explored.

"I think Jeff Gordon has a right to be saying that, and yes, we are looking at that," Hunter said. "I don't know at this point in time what we're going to do. Everybody in the world is making suggestions."

It's a situation NASCAR hasn't faced before. In the first season of the Chase, 2004, Johnson went into the final regular-season event with a 50-point lead on Gordon. The next season, eventual champion Tony Stewart led Greg Biffle by 209. Last year, Matt Kenseth led Johnson by nine points. In each of those cases, the regular-season leader retained a slim advantage entering the Chase. That changed this year, when in an effort to further stoke competition, NASCAR instituted a policy of seeding its Chase drivers based on race victories, regardless of where they stood in the points.

"Everybody knew going in what the points were," Jeff Burton said. "There's been a cry throughout the public and in the media about making wins more important than finishing fifth, and that's what this point structure does. It's an example of, be careful what you ask for. This has been a constant cry in the garage from fans and media over wins should mean more, and now they do, and the guy who has led the points pretty much all the time is second. There's always the other side of things. It doesn't matter to me. Whatever the rules are, it's our job to take advantage of them. But when you get something, you have to understand, it's not all positive, and there are other sides." (Continued)