Changing a shock

Certainly the idea that begat NASCAR’s Chase for the Sprint Cup - formerly the Nextel Cup, and the Winston Cup before that - was going to take some time to catch on, before the 10-race playoff among the top 12 point-getters of the 26-race regular season was universally embraced as the format by which NASCAR determined the champion of its premier touring series.

“Truthfully, it took me at least two seasons to embrace the Chase,’’ said Jimmie Johnson, winner of the last three Sprint Cup titles who will begin his quest for an unprecedented fourth in a row when the Chase gets underway today with the Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

“I just didn’t like it,’’ Johnson said, expressing a sentiment shared by many drivers at the time. “I liked the old point system and, oddly enough, I have won my championships with the Chase, a system that took me a long time to buy into. So it’s just one of those things.’’

While Johnson said “winning the championship with the old rules was much tougher,’’ his Hendrick Motorsports teammate, Jeff Gordon, who won all four of his NASCAR titles under the old system implemented during the Winston Cup era, would beg to differ.

Gordon, who enters this Chase as the sixth seed with 5,010 points, qualified for five of the six Chases, missing out in 2005. He finished third in 2004 behind Kurt Busch, champion of the inaugural Chase; was sixth in 2006; second in 2007 behind repeat champion Johnson, despite posting nine top-10 finishes and victories at Talladega and Charlotte; and was seventh last year after going winless the entire season.

“I think any time that you make that drastic of a change, it’s a bit of a shock,’’ Gordon said. “I can’t say I was quite prepared for it. But when Nextel came along and everything was changed quite a bit, it gave it a good opportunity to make a big drastic change. Sprint has been able to really follow that up with a lot of excitement. I think it’s the right thing to do for the sport. As a competitor, it took me a little while to adjust to that.’’

“I don’t feel like anything owes me,’’ he added. “The only thing that I really feel is that because it’s such a drastic change that even if we win the championship this year, I don’t think you can count it as five. I think you count it as one and you count the others as four. It’s separated.’’

While so many seemed to balk at the switch in formats, Gordon said, “To me, the history has changed and how you go about the championship and who is crowned as the champion is totally different. And so I think it’s more challenging than it’s ever been.

“It’s very competitive and extremely exciting to see 12 guys going for it over 10 races in a playoff-type system; I think it’s where our sport needs to be, especially to be able to compete with the other major sports.’’

So whose idea was it, anyway? Who deserves the credit for the complete revamp of the points system?

“It was actually Brian France’s idea,’’ said Jim Hunter, NASCAR’s vice president of corporate communications, referring to NASCAR’s chairman and CEO. “He and Mark Dyer, who was working for us at the time, were at dinner one night and they were talking about different scenarios of some sort of playoff system. And Brian sort of said, ‘How about if we did this?’ and Mark says, ‘Well, it might work.’ ’’

France wanted to bolster waning media coverage at a time during the fall when NASCAR’s grueling 36-race season reached the home stretch, going head-to-head with college football and the NFL, the Major League Baseball playoffs, and the start of the NBA and NHL seasons.

“The biggest thing was that once we reached this part of the season, we fell off the radar as far as coverage,’’ Hunter said. “Once Labor Day hit, and a race would be big, it’d be page 8, three or four paragraphs, no big deal. TV would or would not even mention it. So the last third of the season, we were just nowhere.’’

In an attempt to create some buzz, France implemented a system in which the top 10 point-getters through the first 26 races of the season would advance to a 10-race playoff. Any driver outside the top 10 but within 400 points of the regular-season leader also would qualify for the Chase.

“Brian started floating it with Mike [Helton, NASCAR president] and me and everybody else and we said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ ’’ Hunter said. “Then his dad [the late Bill France Jr., NASCAR’s former chairman and CEO] was like, ‘Are you nuts?’ But he hung in there with it.’’

After some tweaking to the original format, with the expansion of the field from 10 to 12 and the reseeding of the field with 10 bonus points awarded for each regular-season victory, the Chase seemed to stick, drawing more fan and media interest.

“In think in the big picture, it’s done a lot for our sport,’’ Johnson said. “We can look at some things to tweak it and maybe celebrate the regular-season champion a little more and . . . things like that, but in general we are on the right track.’’

Michael Vega can be reached at vega@globe.com.