After NASCAR’s offseason points restructure, 35 races and plenty of skirmishes on and off the track (including two famous punches), the remarkable 2026 season all comes down to a title-clinching Sunday in South Florida.
And it likely will feature very few surprises.
If there are any twists or turns left in this year’s chase, they will occur over the 267 laps of the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Homestead-Miami Speedway (3 p.m. ET, NBC).
Sadly — and surely not to NASCAR’s liking – the smart money is on no drama as Kyle Larson holds a plump lead over Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Christopher Bell (minus-67) and Denny Hamlin (minus-70).
Larson, a two-time Cup champ in the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, can clinch his third title and repeat as the sport’s top driver as soon as Stage 1’s end.
Even if Larson earns no stage points on Sunday, he is guaranteed to win the championship if he finishes no worse than 28th in the 40-car field.
This is not the ending NASCAR wanted when it revisited the old Chase format instead of the Championship Four from previous seasons, with some quirks thrown in for bonus points.
The biggest change was getting 55 points for winning, a 15-point increase.
Talk in the garage was if a hot shoe could warm up and win three times over the first nine Chase starts, then that driver was probably going to be in pretty strong position to lift the hardware in Florida’s sub-Miami region at the 1.5-mile speedway.
Winless through 26 races of the 2026 season, Larson improbably fit the bill.
Bell may have won the initial Chase race — the Southern 500 on Sept. 6 at Darlington — but the Elk Grove, Calif., driver, who also won the 2021 title, managed to snap an almost unbelievable 51-race winless streak the next week just outside of St. Louis.
That set the tone for eight positive finishes over the first nine Chase races: Three victories, three more top-five finishes and two more top-10s.
His only blemish was a 34th due to an accident in Arizona at a track where he won the title last season, but knew he would struggle this time around and warned fans as much.
So, during a season Toyota has ruled with 18 wins in 35 starts, Chevrolet almost assuredly walks away with one of its drivers repeating as champion.
Larson said the turning point was the Labor Day weekend visit to Darlington where he finished fifth and gathered nine stage points.
“I really had no confidence, zero, before the Chase,” he said this week. “Hope, but no confidence. I remember leaving that race thinking, ‘Man, that’s the first time it’s felt like the 5 team in forever’ because we were calling a race to win.”
Hamlin, who was the No. 1 seed entering the Chase, still has a mathematical chance to claim the title for the first time in eight tries.
However, he must win Sunday’s race and have Larson finish at least 29th. Even then, Hamlin needs to collect every possible Stage point.
This points system is a step in the right direction, though Hamlin would probably request a less drastic points reset before The Chase.
Maybe NASCAR does tweak the format for next year — not to appease Hamlin but simply not to reduce as many points from a driver who was the best through the first 26 races. Hamlin won five pre-Chase races, including three in a row.
In the old Winston Cup model, Hamlin would be leading Tyler Reddick by 393 points and likely have wrapped up the title after Talladega on Oct. 25.
This Winston Cup points system, which was scrapped following Matt Kenseth’s one-win championship season in 2003, would have awarded Bell the title the past two seasons.
However, there’s no point in thinking NASCAR moves forward in determining its next champion by taking all those steps back.
