5 ways NASCAR could change its controversial playoff format

Joey Logano captured his third NASCAR Cup Series championship last Sunday at Phoenix Raceway in a duel against Team Penske teammate Ryan Blaney – but the outcome of the race left many fans fuming over the playoff format, which for the second successive year crowned a champion who was altogether unimpressive through much of the regular season.

In 2021, Kyle Larson dominated the NASCAR Cup Series, racking up 10 race victories en route to his first career championship. It was the type of year that evoked memories of Jeff Gordon’s 13-win season in 1998, where one team continually proved it was the best in the field and was rewarded at the end of the year.

Such a dominant year in NASCAR’s top series is not the norm in the playoff era, however. In 2023, Ryan Blaney overcame a horrendous regular season, buoyed by a single race win at Charlotte that cemented his place in the playoffs. Over that 26-race span, Blaney had just 12 top-10 finishes, and nearly as many finishes of 21st of worse (10). Yet the No. 12 team was able to survive the first elimination round, won at Talladega to get into the final eight, won at Martinsville to race for a championship, and beat Kyle Larson and William Byron at Phoenix to win his first title. Blaney set a modern-era record for fewest Top-5 finishes by a champion with eight.

To a certain fan, or to a pro-playoffs NASCAR executive, Blaney’s Cinderella story run through the playoffs was exactly the type of storyline and dramatic triumph the format was designed to deliver. Plus, Blaney is a fan favorite and had never won before, so many fans were happy to see him celebrate, even if Larson and Byron were much better over the course of the season.

Tensions have finally boiled over in 2024, though, after the same exact thing just happened again. Logano one-upped his teammate, compiling just seven Top-5 finishes over the course of a championship season but winning two of the last four races, and ending 2024 with an average finishing position of 17.1. To make matters worse, a NASCAR staffer told Denny Hamlin after a controversial Martinsville race that social media users criticizing the format were merely “bots.”

Following the season finale, it appears the message is getting through to NASCAR that many fans (not to mention drivers, teams and even broadcasters) are unsatisfied. NASCAR’s Elton Sawyer confirmed this week that the organization would be taking a “deeper dive” into the playoff system, saying that “we will take input from our fans, our competitors, and our industry stakeholders this off-season, and if there is a way to tweak it, make it better, we will do that.”

So how can NASCAR tweak it’s playoff formula to create a better product for its fans and competitors? Let’s take a look at how the system currently works:

How the current NASCAR playoff system works

NASCAR has continually tweaked its format since the 2004 introduction of the “Chase,” but as of 2024, here’s how it works in a nutshell:

1. A 26-race regular season. Race winners in the regular season automatically qualify for the 16-driver playoffs, unless there are more than 16 unique winners. Drivers accrue playoff points throughout the year by winning races and stages, and the playoff points persist through each playoff reset, excluding the final round.

2. The 16 playoff drivers begin a 3-race Round of 16. Points are reset from the regular season, and only playoff points carry over. In each round of the playoffs, winning a race guarantees you a spot in the next round, regardless of your points standing.

3. After three races, four drivers are eliminated and a three-race Round of 12 begins. The process repeats with the Round of 8, until we are left with a final Championship 4 heading into the final race of the year.

4. The Championship 4 drivers begin the final race even on points, and are unable to score any stage points throughout the race. The remaining playoff driver who finishes ahead of the other three is the champion.

Here are six options for NASCAR consider as we head into the 2025 season:

Option 1: Keep the playoffs, but spread the championship round over three races

The Championship 4 would battle over the last three races to earn the most points, similar to the 10-race Chase format used in the past. Playoff points wouldn’t carry over, but stage points would count in the final three races. – Austin Konenski, Motorsports Wire

Option 2: Denny Hamlin’s format

Hamlin has been a vocal critic of the current playoff format, and has proposed his own variation that keeps one round of eliminations. Under the Denny format there’d be:

1. Double points for the 26-race regular season

2. 16 drivers qualifying for the playoffs

3. A round of seven races including all 16 playoff drivers still eligible. Following the seventh race, the Championship 4 would advance according to the points standings

4. Points would reset to zero for the Championship four, and the new points leader after the final three races would be the champion

Option 3: Move the championship race every year

Of all the issues NASCAR faces, I really don’t believe that the playoff format as it exists today is near the top of the list. The departure of major household name stars over the decades, the general cultural shifts among sports fans in the country – it’s worth noting that MLB World Series and NBA Finals viewership has also plummeted in the last 15 years – and the limitations of the Next Gen car (and previous car iterations) all contribute more to determining NASCAR’s TV ratings than the playoff format does.

And, in fact, the format in 2024 delivered incredible moments in the second half of the playoffs. Las Vegas, Homestead, Martinsville and Phoenix produced incredible races and storylines. As a viewer, the on-track product and lap-to-lap tension imposed by the format was great.

My biggest issue with the current format of a one-race championship decider is that NASCAR is staging it at the same track every year. Certain teams and drivers naturally perform better at short tracks, intermediate tracks, superspeedways and road courses than others, but if you’re always going to the same place, you’re giving some drivers a built-in advantage.

Take Ryan Blaney, for example. If you’re Blaney, you’d hope that Phoenix hosts the finale for the rest of your career, as he’s significantly better than any other driver in the field at Phoenix in recent years. In his last eight races there, Blaney’s average finish is 3.9 – nearly six spots better than the next active drivers on the list (William Byron: 9.4 and Kyle Larson: 9.5).

Tyler Reddick, meanwhile, began last Sunday’s race essentially knowing the deck was stacked against him, as his 14.4 average finish ranks 14th among all drivers in that span. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t a factor the entire race.

It’s also worth seriously asking whether Phoenix is capable of producing a great finale for the television audience with the Next Gen car. The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck conducts a poll after every Cup Series race asking his followers “was this a good race?” Over the last six races at Phoenix races, on average only 48.7 percent of the thousands of voters said that a race at Phoenix was good. Over that same period, tracks like Kansas and Homestead have never failed the “was it good” test, or even failed to get 80% of the “yes” vote.

NASCAR has plenty of great tracks that can host a finale in November, from Las Vegas to Homestead to Charlotte to Darlington. Yes, NASCAR spent millions renovating Phoenix Raceway to be the “home of the championship race,” but that shouldn’t get in the way of providing new challenges to teams year-to-year and more interesting races to fans. – Nick Schwartz

Option 4: Steve Letarte’s format

Letarte shared his own potential format on Denny Hamlin’s podcast. Under the Letarte format, only race winners would qualify for the playoffs, and the championship round would be contested across three races.

1. Race winners from the first 26 races of the year would advance to the playoffs, no matter how few or how many race winners there are. No driver could point their way into the playoffs without winning a race.

2. The playoff drivers would be seeded based upon the bonus points they earned over the course of the regular season through race wins and stage wins. The top-seeded driver would start the playoffs with more points than the No. 2 driver, and so on.

3. A final group of four would run a three-race championship round to determine a champion. (Letarte was open as to how many eliminations would take place before that, with either a seven-race round leading into the final three, or something closer to the elimination system we have now.)

4. The venues in the final round would rotate in order every few years.

Option 5: Revert to the classic full-season points structure

To be clear: There is no way NASCAR will ever go back to the classic 36-race cumulative points system, and there’s not really any evidence that it would help in the first place or that it would provide season-long drama.

There are diehard fans who keep track of what the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series points would have been under the old system, and they’ll be happy to tell you that Christopher Bell would have edged Chase Elliott by five points at Phoenix, having overcome a massive 400+ point deficit in the final 12 weeks. What an incredibly exciting run that would have been!

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way and it’s not the ’90s anymore. Drivers and teams would strategize and execute races in a completely different way if there weren’t stage points or playoff-clinching wins to chase after. If you desperately want full-season points, there’s always Formula 1 (which has produced a whopping two close championship battles that weren’t clinched multiple races ahead of time in the last nine years). – Nick Schwartz

Option 6: Keep things exactly the way they are

There is nothing wrong with the NASCAR Cup Series playoff format, and if you disagree, hear me out. I started covering NASCAR in 2017, as long as this playoff format has been around, so I don’t know anything different. But NASCAR fans do, and therein lies a huge part of the problem.

Some fans don’t like the current playoff format because they can’t let go of the belief that the most dominant driver and team throughout the season should be the champion. That’s how it worked before, and that’s what many want back. But that’s not interesting, it’s not comparable to other sports and it potentially allows the championship to be decided multiple races before the season finale.

“You can have a great regular season; it seeds you better for the playoffs, right?” Joey Logano said after winning his third title. “Now, that doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to go all the way to the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup Finals or the NBA Finals. It doesn’t matter. It might help you. It’s the same way in NASCAR.”

The current playoff format works, chaos and controversies and all. It’s engaging, makes every playoff race matter and further emphasizes the importance of a strong regular season.

The regular season just isn’t everything, like pretty much every other sport. And to say a NASCAR champion’s title isn’t real if they’re not the strongest driver through all 36 races is, as Logano put it, “bull-[expletive].” – Michelle Martinelli

This article originally appeared on For The Win: 5 ways NASCAR could change its controversial playoff format