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Happy Hour: It's never going to only be about the racing

Matt Kenseth won at Dover in May (Getty).
Matt Kenseth won at Dover in May (Getty).

As inspection has dominated the first two weeks of the 2016 Chase, a common refrain is hope that the focus in the NASCAR world will go back to the racing on the track.

If only it was that simple.

Just Thursday NASCAR issued a rules update defining what an encumbered finish is. The word “encumbered” entered the NASCAR lexicon before the Chase when the sanctioning body said severe penalties would jeopardize a team’s chances at using a win for Chase advancement.

An encumbered finish doesn’t take the win away, however. It simply means that if a team wins a race but receives a lug nut or laser inspection penalty (or any other severe penalty) worthy of an encumbered finish, the win does not count for the next round of the Chase. A points penalty is also added, meaning the team will be in a severe hole trying to move forward.

The win, while still existing in the box scores and in the location of the trophy at the winning team’s residence, still happens. It’s just meaningless with an encumbered finish. It’s probably the closest we’ll get to NASCAR taking a win away without actually taking a win away.

Outside of the encumbered phase, the 2016 season has never been solely about the racing anyway. A lot of focus has been about the rules changes made after 2015 and rules changes NASCAR is making for 2017 that chop even more downforce off the cars. There’s the great lug nut debate of the spring (another reason why we’re discussing encumbered finishes) and NASCAR is still searching for a title sponsor for the Cup Series to replace Sprint after the season.

That’s just a paragraph too. We didn’t even mention the CEO’s decision to endorse Donald Trump in February and distract from a season that has just begun.

NASCAR is appealing because it’s more than just what happens on the track. Yes, the racing is the main appeal and why many of us have fallen in love with the sport in the first place. But the soap opera of rules, personalities and stories that are at times stranger than fiction is what helps feed our addiction. Yeah, there may be a lot less dysfunction without some of the craziness that happens on a regular basis. But it wouldn’t be nearly as fun to pay attention to either.

Let’s get to your tweets. After all, there is a Chase elimination race on Sunday at Dover. What’s going to happen?

We can safely say someone will win and someone will finish second…

The four drivers outside the 12-driver Chase cutoff heading into Dover aren’t much of a surprise. Jamie McMurray and Austin Dillon are each five points behind Kyle Larson in 12th while Tony Stewart is 11 points back and Chris Buescher is 30 back.

We can pretty much count Buescher out of the mix. He’s not going to win the race unless rain and fog hit Dover on Sunday. And even then, someone else will figure out his strategy and prevent him from winning. The staying out idea worked at Pocono because the track is so big that it takes a long time to go a lap down.

Of the three remaining drivers outside the top 12, McMurray has the best chance to get in if we’re going on past Dover performance. While Stewart won at the track in 2013 he’s been pretty damn bad at the track otherwise. And Dillon has never finished in the top 10 in six starts.

We predicted that McMurray, Dillon, Stewart and Buescher would be the first four drivers eliminated and we’re sticking with it.

Oh, speaking of Stewart, he could get eliminated from the final Chase of his career while driving a brown car. What a world.

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If Reed was going to make his Cup debut this season it needed to be at a plate track. Remember, he won at Daytona in 2015. That win (which came in the midst of a crazy race) was his only top-10 finish of the season. It was a feat that’s nearly impossible to achieve. A driver typically finishes in the top 10 a few other times over the course of a full season. Especially when driving for a top-level team in Roush Fenway.

But he’s improved significantly recently. He has five top-10 finishes this season and four have come in his last 10 races. Should that automatically get you a Cup race? No, but he has a sponsor and we all know just how big sponsors are in the Cup racing equation. We’ll see where his career goes in 2017.

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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!