That said, the plan for this weekend is for Junior to race until the first caution in the Siemens 300 and then turn the reins of the #8 Bud car over to Martin Truex, Jr. (Junior subs for Junior). Given Junior's current injury state, it may not be too many laps before a (self-induced?) caution is called. And we all know what the kicker is...

Junior will receive full points for whatever position Truex finishes in. Going into this weekend, Junior is 105 points behind Jimmie and 138 points in front of Jeff Gordon, so it's a fairly tight race at the top. He's 542 points away from being knocked out of the Top 10, and thus the "Race for the Championship." So here's a proposal. I think NASCAR should institute an immediate policy that a driver who gives way to a substitute driver either:

a.) receives points equivalent to the percentage of laps completed by the car that the driver was responsible for (you driver 80% of the laps, you get 80% of the final points), or

b.) receives points only if they have completed a certain percentage of the race's final number of completed laps (50%?).

Why make it immediate? Because it won't hurt Junior much. Even if Jeff Gordon wins the race with the most laps led and this sort of policy were in place, Junior would be just 47 points behind him in 3rd place. Junior would still maintain at least a 47 point lead over Stewart (assuming a 2nd place finish with at least 1 lap lead). In fact, it would just about take a 1-9 finish for the top 10 for Junior to be even 300 points away from being knocked out of the top 10.

In other words, there's not much to lose in this situation. They institute a fair policy that can then be in place for any future occurances of this sort of situation and they don't really harm Junior's championship run in a meaningful way. This wouldn't have worked last year because points were points back then. This year, you're talking about Junior essentially being forced to give up 5 points (the "Race for the Championship" difference between 2nd and 3rd after the reset).

Now I know these sorts of situations have come up in the past, including Tony Stewart not being able to finish a race because of exhaustion, but the past is the past. The fact is that there are more drivers now with more opportunity to win than ever before, IMHO. Because of that, there are certain rules for competition that need to be reviewed again and this is one of them. The days of rewarding a driver with full points for a partial race should be behind NASCAR. We don't credit baseball players with a full game of stats after 1 AB. We don't credit sprinters with a full race after 10m. It's time that NASCAR only credit drivers for what they driver.