Double points extend IndyCar title chase - Miles

Mark Miles understands fans don't want a bunch of gimmicks to help determine the Verizon IndyCar Series champion. But he maintains double points for the season finale at Sonoma is almost a necessity.

"People might not want to hear this, but we do know, that now that we're racing on Labor Day, and two weeks later those television ratings are down," the president and CEO of Hulman & Company said in an interview with RACER.

"What would happen if the championship was over before we got to September? A purist would say, well that's just the way it worked out, somebody clinched it before we got to September so, fine.

"But I don't want to have nothing to talk about for the last two races of the year. We need the ongoing narrative of the race."

For example, with no double points for Indianapolis or Sonoma and no qualifying points for Indy, Simon Pagenaud would have clinched the 2016 title after Watkins Glen – the next-to-last race. Instead, the Team Penske driver had to wait until the finale, where he won the pole and the race.

In 2015, had there been no double points for Indy or Sonoma, and only the one traditional point for taking the Indy 500 pole, Juan Pablo Montoya – not Scott Dixon – would have been champion by three points. (As it was, Dixon won the Indy pole but no points were awarded because of Chevrolet's issues in practice).

Before IndyCar adopted a double-points format in 2014 for the 500-milers at Indy, Pocono and Fontana, the championship still had been decided in the finale eight consecutive years so it didn't need any gimmicks to make it close.

"From time to time, including this week, we'd look at the numbers to say, if we did this, what would that mean?" continued Miles. "Or what would it have meant historically in terms of the way that the championship ended, and developed over the course of the year?

"It is artificial by a purist's standard, I understand that. But it's up to me to say, look, there needs to be more at stake at the finale, and it's the same for everybody. It has mathematically kept the race alive in a way that would not have been the case."

But qualifying points at Indianapolis seem the least worthy and most gimmicky.

"I don't think too many people do care, one way or another about that, but I get the point," Miles said. "One might run the numbers to say, what if it was just double for the race? Then what would that do to us? So we're never going to not be looking. Let's talk about the year-end."