The year is 2035. Hank and Bubba are in the Groundhog Den, located somewhere down South.
It is a beautiful fall Sunday afternoon and Joe, the bartender, turns on the battery of TV sets to all 40 National Football League games.
Bubba calls Joe over and asks if he has a radio so he and Hank might listen to the stock car race.
"Sorry, Bubba," Joe responds. "We don't have a radio in the place. Where are those poor guys racing today, anyway? Chile? No, no, I think I remember somebody saying it was Siberia. Anyway, WMFOOLISH is about the only station that carries racing anymore, and if I remember correctly, the last hurricane blew down its tower."
"Dang," Hank says. "I wish it was like when I was a kid and they still ran races here and the events were still on television and radio."
"Yup," Bubba says, "Dad remembers what it was like before they strangled the system and started running two thirds of the season to get down to a 10-race shootout. He said that led to just about everybody losing interest in racing. I guess it was a few years after they started the new system that a lot of people stopped going to the races and quit watching them on television. Then the ratings dropped and TV went away. Not a lot of the sponsors liked it, and they followed TV out the door."
"Wasn't long after that, as I remember it," Hank says, "that teams started hauling them cars everywhere trying to find new fans."
Hank orders another round of drinks. "The formula was Brian France's brainchild and the curse of race car drivers," Hank says. "He changed the system for what he thought would be an improvement in entertainment. It was TV-based, and certainly not competition-based. The real race drivers didn't like that. They didn't think it was fair, and it turned out not to be.
Bubba speaks up: "Yeah, the word back then was that France wasn't satisfied with what his grandfather and father had accomplished, and he wanted to try a new system to compete in the fall with the World Series and the National Football League. I guess you could say his idea backfired, couldn't you?"
Hank sips from his glass, thinks a moment, and adds: "You know, the kid didn't have to do that. Maybe the old point system needed some going over. A few changes here and there would have helped. Winning a race ought to have been worth some points. But there was no need for him to strangle the whole system.
"Yeah, there have been a few runaways in the tussle to determine a season point champion. But there was a whole bunch of white-knuckled shootouts, too.
"I read about a race way back when Richard Petty trailed Darrell Waltrip by 155 points with 10 races to go and squeaked ahead by 11 in the season's finale to win one of his seven championships. Same story told that Alan Kulwicki was 278 points down with 10 races to go and won it all. Tony Stewart was in Fifth Place one year with 10 races to go, and he came out on top.