Fox Sports brought its NASCAR team together in Charlotte, N.C., to look ahead to the 2007 Nextel Cup season, which begins with Fox coverage of the Daytona 500.

That’s Racin’ motorsports writer David Poole sat down with analysts Darrell Waltrip and Larry McReynolds for a conversation about the state of the sport. Waltrip, a three-time champion in the Cup series, and McReynolds, who worked with such drivers as Davey Allison and Dale Earnhardt as crew chief, had some pointed things to say.

Here are some highlights (an extended version of this interview is available on www.thatsracin.com):

¢ David Poole: NASCAR is expected to announce fairly minor “tweaks” to the Chase for the Nextel Cup format next month. What do you think about the format?

Darrell Waltrip: The problem with the Chase is it’s too long. Ten races is too many. Ten drivers are enough, you don’t need any kind of fan vote or wild card or anything like that.

I think if you had some system where if you had 10 races and had sort of a five-race playoff to get to the finals. You have 10 guys going in, but after the fifth race the bottom five are kicked out. Then those five guys run the final five races for the championship.

¢ Poole: But they’ve said they’re not looking at anything that dramatic.

Waltrip: NASCAR just opens the paper up and reads it and says, “The fans want a green-white-checkered rule, so we’ll give them that. The fans don’t want to race back to the caution, so we won’t race back to the caution.” They listen to the fans, up to a point, but then when it comes to something they don’t want to do, they don’t want to listen.

The Chase is their idea, and you know how they are about their ideas.

Larry McReynolds: And that’s where the “car of tomorrow” fits in, too.

¢ Poole: Everywhere I go people talk about how we need to square off the cars and make them boxier. I’ve even had people tell me the trucks are like “flying bricks” and that’s a good thing. Now, Tony Stewart uses that same term to talk about the “car of tomorrow and it’s a negative thing. What am I missing?

McReynolds: But the problem could have been fixed with what we’ve got.

Waltrip: They say the new car is safer and is going to cost the teams less money. How can you argue with that? That’s what they put on you to start with, like some kind of guilt trip.

But they said they were going to make a car that’s less aero-dependent. What are the two most aero-dependent things you can put on a race car?

McReynolds: A splitter (on the front air dam) and a wing.

Waltrip: A splitter and a wing. Those cars in traffic are going to be worse than they are now because those two things are aero driven. They don’t work unless there is air on them, so when you’re riding around behind somebody, what’s going to happen?

They will eventually get them better, I guess. Initially, though, they’re going to have their hands full trying to make this package work.

¢ Poole: The television ratings dipped in 2006 and there’s talk about the sport’s growth beginning to stall out. The saying is that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” My question, then, is whether it’s broken?

Waltrip: The races aren’t too long, they just take too long to run. They’re being interrupted, whether it’s a 13-gallon fuel cell or a debris caution every time you turn around, races are being interrupted too often. A race has a flow. It’s not different from watching any other sport and the referees are whistle-happy, stopping the action.

¢ Poole: How does that impact a crew chief when he’s calling the race?

McReynolds: I think it makes it more predictable because you know you’re going to get a debris caution. Chad Knaus (Jimmie Johnson’s crew chief) said, “I had no problem putting four tires on at Atlanta because I knew there would be a caution to bunch us back up.”

Waltrip: That is out of control. Every time a hot dog wrapper blows across the track, you have to have a caution.

McReynolds: And it just seems like so much of the emotion has been taken out of it, whether that’s because the Federal Communication Commission has cracked down or whatever, the fans are asking whether the guys are making so much money now that they’re not willing to race as hard as maybe they used to.