JOLIET, Ill. -- The 2006 season featured one of the greatest comebacks in modern NASCAR championship history. Jimmie Johnson was 156 points back with six events left after a crash at Talladega Superspeedway seemed to leave his title hopes in as much disrepair as his race car. Over the next five weeks he didn't finish worse than second, and under the swaying royal palms of South Florida capped off a first championship in what would become an unprecedented four-year reign.

And it might never have happened, not under an elimination format that may very well have knocked Johnson out of the running and perhaps altered the course of NASCAR history. No wonder so many drivers react with such vehemence to the idea of an elimination element being added to the Chase, which is one of the ideas that's been tossed around in the media since NASCAR chairman Brian France talked about potential changes to the Cup Series playoff format last week.

“

The more you narrow that up and keep resetting points, keep adding guys, the more you're making this a sport [where] chance and luck is going to be a factor.

”

-- DENNY HAMLIN

"When you eliminate guys after two races or something, if you wreck the first one, you've got to damn near win the second one to make sure you're not eliminated," Denny Hamlin said at Chicagoland Speedway. "Unless they put us on our own points system, 1-15 points system or something like that where you gap the first guy and then go down from there, I don't see how an elimination thing will work. You have to perform every single week, and our sport is not all about that. There's a certain part of this sport that is about luck, and other sports it's head-to-head. When another guy makes a mistake, you win. You can't be the one to make a mistake, and in our sport you just can't have chance be the one to decide our champion."

Granted, France never mentioned the idea of an elimination format himself, went out of his way to point out that NASCAR cannot implement a winner-take-all scenario, and added that a driver's season worth of work needs to be balanced along with his performance in a playoff. But when speaking of potential changes, he did use terms like "dramatic" and "high-impact," and he did talk about how the sport could use more Game 7-type moments, and he didn't specifically rule out eliminations when the subject was brought up. That's prompted plenty of questions in the garage area, most of them unanswerable at the moment.

"I have heard some wild stuff. I think it comes down to the question of, do you want the champion to be the driver and the team that has performed best on average through the whole season, or do you want a really dramatic final race?" Carl Edwards asked.

"Racing, I believe, is in a unique position in sports where after a weekend's race everybody is ranked right there. It is not subjective. You don't have to go back and have people vote on who is best this week or whatever. It is right there with your finishing order. To me, the true way to crown a champion is who finishes best on average throughout the whole season. Now, racing is complex and there are a lot of things that can go wrong, so it would be nice to have a mulligan or two. I just see the potential, even now, to have a guy who wins 30 races in a season and is not the champion. How would you deal with that? I guess there is always that chance, but if you start going down that road it just comes down to that question. Do you want the best team and driver of the year, or do you want it to be dramatic?" (Continued)