NASCAR goes Back to the Future by restoring Chase title format

No one has ever driven a Delorean in a NASCAR event, but NASCAR is going back to the future.

On Monday, NASCAR Chairman Steve O’Donnell, sitting alongside Hall of Famers Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr., announced a long-awaited overhaul of how top stock car racing series will determine their champion. There will still be a 26-race “regular season,” and after that final event, the top 16 drivers in the points standings will still be separated from the rest to begin a ten-race playoff that will crown a champion.

But gone are the win-and-ins, when a racer was essentially assured of a playoff spot simply by winning a race. No more elimination rounds. No more official stick-and-ball style support. Gone were playoff points and what had become a glut of extra math.

The only arithmetic required now is to add up the points earned in races (winners now receive 55 points compared to 40, and stage points still exist). Whoever has the most when the checkered flag flies at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November will hoist the grand Silver Cup.

In other words, it’s essentially a return to the way NASCAR champions were crowned from 2004 to 2013, the pre-Playoff era, known as the Chase. Fittingly, two of the three current drivers who have also shared the stage are named Chase: Chase Elliott and Chase Briscoe.

It was Elliott who said it was attractive that now a champion would “go out in the wash” rewarded for a year’s effort, instead of being determined by the roulette wheel of the final race, a four-driver, best-performing winners format that could erase a year’s work. It certainly did that to Denny Hamlin in the 2025 finale, who led the series in wins and dominated the season finale race until a late caution in Phoenix destroyed everything.

“We all grew up with it,” Ryan Blaney said of himself and the Chases in regards to the Chase. “It just feels right.”

It also looks cleaner. Simpler. Largely gimmick-free. He passes the elevator test. You can explain it to a friend on the ride to your hotel room instead of needing a full dinner and a calculator. While it’s not a total return to the days of the Winston Cup Series and a 36-point race setup, it’s also not the seemingly ever-changing formula of the playoffs that was shamelessly designed with the goal of attracting potential new fans from other sports by giving them a familiar format.

What it is about is a compromise.

“Yeah, that won’t be enough for some, but I’m so happy,” admitted Martin, who spent the first two decades of his Cup career chasing titles under the 36-race rules, but spent his final decade with the Chase. He finished second in each format. “I wanted everything. But I’m still happy.”

It was Martin who has long banged a very loud drum in the name of an old-fashioned 36-race revival. This campaign began during the 2025 Daytona 500 weekend, almost a year ago. That’s when NASCAR formed an exploratory committee and met in the massive tower overlooking the World Center of Racing. The group included NASCAR executives, representatives from the television network, several current drivers, including Hamlin, as well as representatives from the automakers and a handful of members of the media. Full disclosure, I was one of those media members.

At that first meeting, everyone was present in person except Earnhardt, who was on the racetrack grounds on Zoom, and Martin, who was also joining via video conference, from his home in Arkansas. The meeting lasted only a few minutes when Martin took over the proceedings with passion, speaking from the heart about his conversations at short tracks across the Midwest with what NASCAR executives have long called the “core fans.”

The 40-time race winner said out loud what everyone in the room already knew. This was the reason the committee was formed in the first place. He said these core fans felt disconnected because what they were watching in the big leagues of NASCAR no longer looked like every other stop on the stock car racing ladder when it came to determining the best of the best.

Martin’s speech set a tone that stuck with the effort until his final announcement Monday. On that February day, as O’Donnell and Martin acknowledged Monday, it was a tone that first hit the committee like a soggy loaf of bread. O’Donnell joked at the press conference: “We wanted to kick Mark out of the room.”

However, even as the conversation continued through the spring and summer via email and other meetings, as discussions of more subtle changes, such as extending the championship fight from just the season finale to being spread out over the final three or four races, Martin’s voice from that February day continued to resonate. Now, admittedly, some of this was not an echo. He also talked about all of this on social media and in various NASCAR media outlets.

The momentum that Martin continued to build, slowly but surely winning over even those who had rolled their eyes at the giant projection screens during that first meeting, was the tug across the line that the conversation about the new format needed. A tug needed back. Not all the way to NASCAR’s past, but certainly in that direction. At the very least, Martin’s push resulted in a much-needed feel-good moment for a sport eager to move on from perhaps its ugliest offseason, punctuated by a controversial antitrust lawsuit and the resignation of commissioner Steve Phelps, the fallout from text messages revealed around that lawsuit.

“I appeal to all racing fans, but especially classics fans, who say to me: ‘I’m not watching anymore,’” Martin told his audience from the stage on Monday. “I say, we need you. Come back. We’re going in the right direction… come back and join us, and we’ll keep moving forward.”

“[I want to] challenge the racing fans and say, ‘Let’s take advantage of what we have,’” Elliott added. “We are so quick to complain about everything. Everything we have and everything we do. Let’s enjoy what we have because we are making history, whether you like it or not. Celebrate the champion…I think this format promotes that.”

This will not be the final format of the NASCAR championship. For 77 years, the sanctioning body has tinkered with its points system more than a crew chief tinkers with his race car. Richard Petty’s seven championships came via six different points systems, including a five-year stretch in which he won four titles with four different points scales. Ultimately, as The King likes to say, “I was just trying to win every week, and if the math worked out in the end, they gave me a big trophy.”

But for now, and for the first time in a long time, the next NASCAR champion will win their crown by sticking to this plan. By actually going back to the future.