Imagine you're behind the wheel of a race car, headed toward the start/finish line for a green, white, checkered restart, and your entire season rests on the outcome of the final two laps.
Finish high enough and you stay in contention for the championship.
Give up too many positions and everything you and your team have worked for all season effectively comes to an end.
And then you realize you have a tire going down.
Or a loose wheel.
Or an engine that’s gone sour.
Do you pull out of line and let everyone, and everything, go rushing past?
Or do you stay in line and hope for the best?
Kevin Harvick chose the latter, and when his underpowered Chevrolet triggered a multicar crash Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway, the final race of Contender Round of this year's Chase for the Sprint Cup ended under a cloud of controversy.
Did Harvick intentionally cause the crash in an attempt to maintain his position and thus escape elimination?
NASCAR officials said Tuesday that they could find no evidence to support such claims.
Several drivers, including two that saw their title hopes dashed, believed otherwise.
Harvick's actions make for great debate. They also raise another question -- what is considered acceptable racing under today's Chase format?
Even the drivers are still trying to figure that one out. And doing so on the fly.
"When the competition is at the level that it's at, and you're seeing that opportunity either slip away or in your grasp, the things that you will go to, the level that you'll take it, you don't even know yourself until you're in that position," four-time series champion Jeff Gordon said Tuesday during media day activities at the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
What's at stake hasn't changed, he said, only the format. "And that's changed things slightly in the urgency of things.
"It's just the opportunity that presents itself that's there in front of you. I don't think that would be any different 20 years ago versus today."
Matt Kenseth, a former champion and one of the four latest Chase casualties, said after Sunday's race that NASCAR officials had "lost total control."
"I got wrecked out two weeks in a row from people doing what they had to do to make the Chase, but call it what you want," the Joe Gibbs Racing driver said.
A week earlier, contact from Joey Logano knocked Kenseth out of the lead in the closing laps at Kansas Speedway. Sunday's finish was the final nail in the coffin.
Perhaps less control is by design. "That's part of the fun of it, but it does need some control," Team Penske driver Brad Keselowski said. "As to whether it's the appropriate amount that we've seen lately, who am I to judge?
"When you get to these elimination races you've got essentially your whole season on the line. It certainly is going to stretch what you're willing to do, but that's not a bad thing, that's a good thing. That's what NASCAR wants. That's why they created this format."
The format, which debuted in 2004, was last revised after 2013 in an attempt to create more "Game 7" type opportunities, with the stakes increasing as each round nears completion.
That much appears to have been accomplished.
But to what extremes drivers and teams will go to advance, and equally important, how such moves are policed, remains open for discussion.
How much is too much? How far is too far?
"I think everybody's going to keep ramping it up, racing more aggressively, racing harder, take more chances," Furniture Row Racing driver Martin Truex Jr. said. "But you don't want to go overboard and just run people over and take people out of the race. That's not fair.
"Everybody has the same opportunity. Everybody has the same right to be on that race track."