Group Qualifying For Daytona - Good, Scary or Questionable Decision for TV?

Until I watched the qualifying process for the Xfinity Series race at Daytona, a restrictor-plate track, I wasn't sure what I thought about the group qualifying process that NASCAR instituted for this 2015 racing season.

Now that I've seen it, I can wholeheartedly say that it's bad enough that racing at Daytona is a crap shoot of luck with pack racing combined with poor decisions on anyone's part. That's part of the show IN THE RACE. And there's this need to put on a show during qualifying, because single car runs are not that appealing to the generic TV viewer.

That's the TV studio talking.

But when someone makes a bad call in one of the group sessions that impacts drivers that are fully capable of getting in the race, well, sure, TV gets more of the exciting wrecks that appeal to the casual TV viewer, but seems completely unfair to the drivers who get caught up in the noise of the wreck. I don't know what the right answer is to make qualifying more "exciting" to the casual viewer, but the probability of screwing up a contender from getting in the race seems to be a steep price to pay for any one team.

 Even though I am no expert, it looks like the groups need to be broken up into even more groups for smaller qualifying crowds, minimizing how many cars can be impacted when a driver makes a bad call in the pack. Just saying.

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