NASCAR says goodbye to encumbered race wins

It’s still gong to be the same, but it really won’t be the same without the weird, magical word to go with the penalty for failing post-race inspection after a victory.

So long encumbered race wins in NASCAR. We hardly knew ye.

Ever so quietly, as ESPN’s Bob Pockrass reports, NASCAR has stated that it won’t be using the term “encumbered” this season to describe race wins that don’t count toward playoff eligibility. The penalty will remain, but different verbiage will be used.

Pockrass notes that “the word that has led to much confusion — not to mention some ridicule,” which is a very fair way to put it. Selfishly, we here at FanSided.com loved it because we wrote an article about what the term meant and readers would come surging back to it every time it was mentioned on TV.

Lost amid the silliness of using a word that no one understood is the fact that the penalty had rare teeth for a NASCAR sanction, effectively costing the driver who ran afoul of it last year a chance to compete for the championship. That would be Joey Logano, who saw his Richmond spring victory wiped away from playoff qualification, which turned out to be a serious blow since he never won another race and couldn’t make the playoff field on points.

That’s fitting, since NASCAR seems loathe to follow the lead of other sports and name anyone other than the person who crosses the start-finish line first the winner, even after the fact. Track and field does this, as do other Olympic sports when someone is caught cheating. But the governing body of stock car racing doesn’t want to do that and has been consistent in that stance, for better or worse.

(And now that race wins are so important for making the playoffs, there’s a strong argument to be made for not naming the second-place driver a “winner” and making the postseason by finishing runner-up in a race.)

So with that being the case, we need another word to take the place of encumbered as it heads for an early retirement. Maybe “disqualified” or “ineligible” can fill in. Or we can go simple English and just say “doesn’t count.”

Next: Choose rule for restarts not coming this season

But we’d be lying if we said we won’t miss encumbered in all of its beautiful, glorious ridiculousness. Hopefully, someone finds another way to put it to use in another sport, if only because we’d love to help explain it to the world all over again.