Lack of competition dilutes Cup rookie award

Eight weeks from now, the NASCAR community will gather in Las Vegas to celebrate either a fifth consecutive championship won by Jimmie Johnson, or a title claimed by whomever interrupted his reign. At the Bellagio hotel the afternoon before the formal awards ceremony, a host of other industry awards will be handed out, from championship crew chief to top engine builder to honors for humanitarianism and service to the sport. And almost certainly, Kevin Conway will be named rookie of the year, a designation that brings with it a nice oil portrait and an even nicer $100,000 check.

It's an award that will be given out almost by default, given that Conway is currently the runaway leader in a rookie points competition that this season involves only two drivers, the second of whom (Terry Cook) hasn't attempted a Sprint Cup Series event since Pocono in July. And it very well may make people uncomfortable, given that NASCAR's highest rookie honor -- the same award once given to Dale Earnhardt, Davey Allison, Geoffrey Bodine, Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, among others -- will go to a driver who's spent much of this season just trying to keep himself inside the top 35.

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Kevin Conway talks about being a rookie in the Cup Series, and his life outside of racing.

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Now, this is no knock against Conway, a likeable guy who's brought a sponsor into the sport and is trying to do the same thing so many others are in racing -- make a living. No, his results on the race track (average finish of 32.7) haven't exactly been stellar, but he's playing within the set of rules he's been given. You can't blame Conway because the recession has forced most major teams to gut their driver development budgets, and prevented someone from putting a first-year driver in the kind of equipment that's good enough to contend. Conway saw an opportunity, and jumped on it. It's not his fault that no one else decided to do the same.

Even so, we now face the very real prospect of NASCAR "honoring" a driver whose 14th-place run in the summer Daytona race has been his only result better than 27th this season, who has finished on the lead lap just three times, who was dropped from his original team in August after a messy dispute that reportedly involved nonpayment of sponsor fees. Conway is currently 34th in drivers' points, and if he falls one more position, he would risk becoming the lowest-finishing rookie of the year since Ken Rush finished 38th in 1957, the second year the award was given. And even he won a pole and earned six top-10 finishes.

Granted, we've been spoiled by many recent rookie winners, who set the bar very high by getting to Victory Lane, often multiple times. Of the last 11 rookies of the year, dating to Tony Stewart in 1999, eight won a race in their first full season on NASCAR's highest level. The exceptions in that group are Kasey Kahne, who finished second five times as a rookie; Jamie McMurray, who won a race as a fill-in for Sterling Marlin before his rookie year began; and Regan Smith, who crossed the finish line first at Talladega but had the victory vacated by NASCAR for dropping below the yellow line. Conway, by contrast, risks becoming only the second Cup rookie winner (along with Smith, thanks to that Talladega asterisk) to receive the award without recording a top-10 finish.

To be fair, though, the rules here aren't quite as obvious as they seem. To be eligible for a rookie of the year award in any of NASCAR's premier series, a driver has to attempt to qualify for eight of the season's first 20 races. The winner is determined not over a full body of work, but by using a candidate's top 17 finishes (or 16 for Nationwide, and 14 for Camping World Trucks). It's done that way because NASCAR and sponsoring company Raybestos, which has backed the rookie awards across all three national series since 1998, want to leave some flexibility for first-year drivers who may not have the funding to run an entire season. (Continued)