Nascar Race Today

Nascar announced on Thursday changes to its end-of-season playoffs, the Sprint Cup Chase for the Championship. The changes, officials said, would place a greater emphasis on winning races. The old format pitted 12 drivers - the top 10 in points and two wild-card entries -- against one another in the final 10 races of the year in a runoff to decide the driving title. Jimmie Johnson, who won six races in 2013, collected his sixth championship, edging out Matt Kenseth, who had seven wins.

The new format will include 16 drivers, with elimination rounds that will whittle the field to the top finishing four, for the season finale at Homestead, Fla., in November. Had the new system been in place in 2013, the series champion would have been Dale Earnhardt Jr., who failed to win a single race.

In other racing news:

■ Glenn Roberts, Tim Flock, Jack Ingram, Maurice Petty and Dale Jarrett were inducted Wednesday into the Nascar Hall of Fame in a ceremony in Charlotte, N.C.

Roberts, considered one of the sport's first superstars, died from complications to injuries he received in a 1964 wreck. Flock, who died in 1998, won championships in the 1950s and even won a race at Hickory Motor Speedway with a monkey, named Jocko Flocko, in the car with him. Ingram, a star decades ago in some of Nascar's second- and third-tier series, won more than 300 Nascar-sanctioned races.

Jarrett, who joined his father, Ned, in the hall, won the Daytona 500 three times and the Brickyard 400 twice. Maurice Petty built engines and turned wrenches for the family's racing dynasty. His brother, Richard, and his late father, Lee, preceded him into the hall.

■ If Formula One teams want to save fuel, Bernie Ecclestone suggests they switch to smaller motor homes, not smaller racecar engines.

The comments made by Ecclestone, the acknowledged chief of the sport, who recently resigned his position on the board of directors of the company that runs the racing series, came last week in response to a test session of the 2014 season's new V6-powered cars at a track in Spain. Ecclestone said that Mercedes alone uses 23 trucks, and he called the switch to smaller engines "totally absurd" and "a total farce." He also said that Formula One fans want noise and speculated that quiet engines will alienate them.

Ecclestone did say, however, that the unpredictability resulting from teams adapting to new technology would make the 2014 season interesting.

■ Michael Schumacher's doctors have started the slow process of reducing his sedation in hopes of returning him to consciousness. The seven-time Formula One champion has been in a medically induced coma since sustaining head injuries in a skiing accident in France on Dec. 29.

The Schumacher family's spokeswoman, Sabine Kehm, confirmed Thursday that the process of "waking him up" had begun, but declined to offer further information.