Jeff Gluck

USA TODAY Sports

DARLINGTON, S.C. -- On the surface, NASCAR’s attempt at heat races in the Xfinity Series looks like a fantastic, worthy experiment that could hint at the sport's future.

The format debuts Saturday at Bristol Motor Speedway and will be used for three more Xfinity races this season. After qualifying, the field will be divided into a pair of 50-lap heat races that will set the starting order for the 200-lap main event.

It will break up the race into more digestible segments for today’s short-attention span society and offer built-in breaks in the action.

The Sprint Cup Series – including Sunday’s Food City 500 -- will stick with the traditional format for now. But could heat races eventually make their way to the big leagues?

Let’s hope so – but with a couple important tweaks to increase drama and fan engagement.

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There’s a big problem with how the heat races (part of the sponsor’s “Dash 4 Cash” promotion) are structured. In the heat races familiar to short-track fans around the country, drivers participate in a series of short races to make it into the main event; if they fail, they run either a lesser race or are eliminated.

But that concept doesn’t exist in Xfinity’s format. There’s no intrigue because all 40 of the participants will make the main event no matter where they finish (unless they crash in their heat and cannot have their car ready in time).

“All the cars are locked in,” JR Motorsports co-owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. said this week. “There’s no drama of being eliminated. When I think about heat races, you run a heat race to get into the main. … That’s anticipation and anxiety and drama and that’s why you watch TV or come to a race is to feel those emotions.”

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Instead, Earnhardt worries the heat races will seem more like a “formality.” As a team owner, he’ll watch and think, “Don’t wreck!” instead of enjoying them. That’s because there’s little incentive to push the limit other than the lineup for a glorified restart.

In that sense, the heats are more like qualifying races; think the Daytona Duels with less mystery. With 42 cars on the entry list, the only eliminations will occur in qualifying itself (a normal session takes place before the heats).

Earnhardt remembered watching the last chance races in Late Model Sportsman events at Charlotte Motor Speedway as a child. The racing itself didn’t look any different, he said, but everyone knew what was at stake.

“Somehow they need to bottle that and create that emotion for the people who are watching it,” he said. “To split us into two fields and let us run around the track for 50 laps when there’s nothing on the line other than where you’re going to start, I don’t know if that’s enough. It could be much more dramatic if you could be eliminated.”

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So why didn’t NASCAR take that step and eliminate 10 or so cars for the main event? It likely comes down to sponsorship. The fragile economics of racing mean pushing away the sponsors of any team is risky, and Earnhardt conceded it would be difficult to explain to one of his car’s backers why a JRM entry failed to make it on track for the race that counted.

Sponsors would “stomp their feet,” he said – which makes it difficult for the argument to go any further.

“It ain’t like it used to be, where we just ran our sport like we wanted to run it,” Earnhardt said. “The sponsors really have influence on that, and they’re not going to want to sit on the sidelines if they don’t make it.”

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So what’s the solution? Earnhardt suggested making the races shorter, but the thought here is that doesn’t go far enough.

Heat races are indeed the best option but they must have an elimination format to succeed. If a driver fails to advance to the main event, that’s no different than wrecking out on lap 1 of a 500-mile race anyway. That’s racing.

The sponsors will just have to get used to it, because heat races hold the key to unlocking the sport’s growth potential – but only if there’s enough drama to get people watching in the first place.

Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck