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."

Johnson took advantage, winning the final two regular-season races, and entering the Chase as the leader. Under the old system, he'd be in fifth, with Gordon, Stewart, Denny Hamlin and Carl Edwards all in front of him.

"I look at say like the NFL. We're trying to compare playoffs to other sports, and it's great that we have a playoff, I definitely think it's more exciting. But usually the team that has the best record is seeded No. 1 and has home-field advantage. I think it's kind of odd that in our series, the person that does that in the regular season actually has a disadvantage," said Gordon, making his 500th career start Sunday.

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"But I don't know how you fix that. If you gave that guy bonus points, and say that guy next year wins six, eight races and the [regular-season] points, he could have a 50-, 60-point or more lead going into the Chase. That's not what [NASCAR] wants. So I don't know. It's easy to say it's not fair when you're in the position of being No. 1. I've been on the flip side of it and felt there was an advantage. In my opinion, we can still win this thing not being No. 1 going in."

Even Johnson, the prime beneficiary of the system this year, seems to agree. But like Gordon, he's not quite sure what to do about it.

"I think that's been something that's been brought up each year, and I do feel that there should be some reward for the regular season," he said. "I don't know what that may be. If you look at other sports and there's a championship won for whatever division it may be, what are those things? I guess they have home-turf advantage depending on the sport, so I don't know what a fair advantage would be moving into that. But I think it would be good for our sport to have a regular-season champion and a postseries champion."

Yet Kurt Busch wonders: what's the point? Even in an expanded 12-man field, all the Chase drivers are separated by 60 points -- the difference between first and 11th on the racetrack. And no driver in Nextel Cup has won more than eight events in a full season since 1998, when Gordon won 13.

"No matter if you were the best team in the regular season, in all the other sports when you go into the playoffs everything starts at zero again. It's even for everybody," Busch said. "I don't think it would make a difference if Gordon was leading right now by 20, or if Jimmie Johnson is leading by 20. If we're all separated by 60, which we are, I think it's pretty much zero. Sixty is about zero in our sport, where you could gain 60 points in a heartbeat. If you gave the regular-season series leader a 100-point edge that might be worth credit, but to be 20 points ahead of a guy or 30, that's not going to make a difference."