I’ve always felt that January and February tend to be the busiest months for the sports that I follow. Over the course of these two winter months, the NBA and NHL hold their All-Star Weekend events, the college basketball season hits its stride, and new champions are crowned in both the NFL and college football playoffs.

Oh, and the Daytona 500 is packed into the middle of all of that.

Although I didn’t start watching NASCAR until the pandemic, I’ve grown to include Daytona in my yearly list of must-watch live events. The “Great American Race,” as it’s dubbed, marks the grand opening of the series’ regular season and functions as the crown jewel of the year’s race catalog.

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Drivers usually give their all to win the race, creating the potential for exciting and unpredictable results, such as Michael McDowell’s upset victory in 2021.

But this year, the vibes are definitely a bit … off.

As preparations begin for Sunday’s 67th edition of the event, NASCAR is trying to dig itself out of a hole in more ways than one. For the past five months, the organization and its leading France family have been embroiled in the drama of a lawsuit that was filed by one of the series’ highest-profile teams.

For some context, 23XI Racing, which began the Cup Series competition in 2021, is a three-car team owned by basketball legend Michael Jordan and current Joe Gibbs Racing driver Denny Hamlin.

The team joined forces with Front Row Motorsports to file an antitrust lawsuit against NASCAR and the France family. The lawsuit alleges that the organization uses its charter system, which functions as a series membership agreement, to engage in anti-competitive and retaliatory practices.

“I love the sport of racing and the passion of our fans, but the way NASCAR is run today is unfair to teams, drivers, sponsors, and fans,” Jordan said in a statement after the suit was filed in early October. “Today’s action shows I’m willing to fight for a competitive market where everyone wins.”

The lawsuit was spurned by the two teams’ refusal to sign the 2025 Charter Agreement over issues surrounding revenue sharing and series governance. While all teams raised objections throughout the negotiation process, 13 of them still signed the agreement, although not all did so under the happiest of terms. Rick Hendrick, owner of Hendrick Motorsports, said that he was “just tired” of negotiating.

While the suit is the series’ biggest problem at the moment, NASCAR also needs to navigate a host of other issues.

Shrinking TV ratings have put the series in an unenviable spot. The 2023 season only averaged around 2.86 million viewers per race, marking the least-watched season in Cup Series history. While 2024 marked a slight improvement in those numbers, the data makes it pointedly apparent that NASCAR has struggled to grow its audience beyond its traditional demographic of fans.

That isn’t to say that the series hasn’t tried to be more forward-facing; it’s just not working as well as expected. The hope is that a new TV deal, including races on Amazon Prime and TNT, will allow the sport to reach a broader audience.

Additionally, in recent years, the schedule has included more novel events that serve as spectacles to draw in casual viewers. A prime example is the Grant Park 165, which will be contested on the streets of downtown Chicago for the third time in July.

USC students and other Angelenos should be very familiar with NASCAR’s attempts at broadening their base. Just minutes away from campus, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was annually converted into a 0.25-mile short track in order to play host to the “Busch Light Clash” exhibition from 2022 to 2024.

This year, though, NASCAR opted to hold the race at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, leaving Southern California without a date on the Cup Series schedule for just the second time since 1997.

The discussion around scheduling brings me to my final gripe with the stock -car series, and one shared by fans and drivers alike: its championship format is unrewarding, and it has devalued the regular season to the point where race wins feel arbitrary.

To explain the system simply, any driver who wins a race automatically qualifies for the playoffs, where 16 spots are open for drivers. Non-winners fill the remaining spots with the highest season point total.

Within the ten playoff races, NASCAR utilizes a staggered elimination system that eliminates the bottom four drivers in points every three races while playoff race winners automatically qualify.

Got all of that? Yeah, I don’t really understand it either.

The overcomplicated format has led to the championship itself being dramatically devalued. Just last year, Team Penske star driver Joey Logano won only one race before the playoff rounds and sat at 11th in total season points. Despite that, he went on to win the year’s championship after his victory at the season-ending Phoenix race.

While Logano’s run doesn’t sound out of place in the wider scope of American sports titles, the “Americanness” of the system is the core problem. NASCAR is the only motorsport to utilize a playoff system instead of simply giving the trophy to the driver with the most points at the end of the season.

The playoffs were instituted by the France family in 2003. The idea resulted from a concerted effort to create highlight moments that could lift the excitement around fall races to be on par with other major sporting events, such as NFL football, which NASCAR competes with for viewers on fall Sundays. But the artificiality of the system is its biggest flaw; what other reason would there ever be for a racing playoff?

Ironically enough, despite efforts to induce drama and excitement, the NASCAR playoffs are still among the least-watched stretches of the season.

With that, I really only have one expectation for the 2025 season: expect the drama off the track to be plentiful. Although they didn’t sign the charter agreement, a court granted 23XI and Front Row an injunction that allows the two teams to compete with their current charters in 2025 as the lawsuit goes on. That case will develop throughout the year, and Jordan’s highly visible profile will surely bring more attention to the sport at large, which can only help.

Regardless, I’ll be tuned into Daytona on Sunday afternoon; it’s still mandatory viewing for me, but that sentiment is becoming rarer and rarer among sports fans. If NASCAR is serious about broadening its public appeal and staying relevant in the minds of newer and younger generations of viewers, then it’s worth considering making some changes.

Darrian Merritt is a freshman writing about the cultural and popular appeal of sports in his column, “The Notebook,” which runs every other Monday.