‘The Chase’ is Back: NASCAR Announces Return to Championship Format

Column By: Stephen Durham / RPW – BOSTON, MA  – NASCAR announced today that the championship format will return to ‘The Chase’ format for the 2026 season. No more win and automatically locking you into the playoffs. The top 16 drivers in the regular-season points will now make the chase after the first 26 races. This will format will carry a similar framework as ‘The Chase’ era from 2005-2013.

The champion will now be decided over the final 10 races of the season in ‘The Chase’. Here is the frameworks of the points system that will be used, with new key enhancements:

• The field sizes for The Chase in each series remain the same — the top 16 drivers in the Cup Series, 12 in O’Reilly and 10 in Trucks — but all drivers qualify based on regular-season points. The “win-and-you’re-in” rule that provided regular-season winners with automatic playoff berths is no more.
• Race winners now collect 55 points, a 15-point increase over the previous points system. Points awards for all other positions and stage results remain the same, but bankable playoff points are no longer part of the format.
• Points will be reset for each series’ Chase field with a 25-point premium awarded to the regular-season champion. Top seeds will start The Chase with 2,100 points, 2,075 for the second seed and 2,065 for the third, with a five-point drop for each seed after.
• The Cup Series’ Chase spans the final 10 races of the season, with nine Chase races for the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series and seven in the Craftsman Truck Series.
• The driver with the most points at the end of the season will be the series champion.

This is what Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR president had to say about the return to the format.

“The biggest thing was looking at who we wanted to be as a sport going forward, and that included really a focus on our core fan base and who had been with us for a long, long time and gotten the sport to where it was. So we wanted our future format to reflect that,” NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell said. “A lot of things you’re going to see and how we talked to the fans, from an overall NASCAR standpoint, was going to really embrace that hardcore fan, and so we felt like the format needed to absolutely reflect that.”