My NASCAR Points System Proposal

My fair offer on a new way to decide a NASCAR champion.

So, how are we feeling about those NASCAR playoffs?

It has been a few days since the most numbing season finale to a year of NASCAR racing that I have ever seen or heard of. Plenty of people at this point have compared it to the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. They wouldn’t be entirely wrong, either; while the circumstances are different, the fallout feels very similar.

While the Phoenix result’s biggest culprit is the NASCAR overtime rules, the reason it got there in the first place was because of the playoffs. All three races this past weekend exposed the worst aspects of this format.

I don’t want to dwell on a lot of this, because there’s been plenty of great writing and podcasts on this topic. What I want to do instead is focus on the future and provide a proposal on what the next NASCAR championship system should look like.

NASCAR has had some form of playoff format for 22 years now. What do they have to show for it? The 2004 and 2005 seasons had an increase in TV ratings year-over-year. But the bottom has fallen out in a dramatic way over the past two decades.

Keep in mind that NASCAR’s rise in the public consciousness came in the years prior to 2004. Kyle Busch is arguably the only real household name that began in the Chase/playoff era, and that’s because he won over 200 races across the three national series.

Mention Mark Martin at a grocery store, and there might be a person or two who knows the name. Mention Ryan Blaney, and nobody knows who that is.

We all want a more simple system that rewards both winning and consistency, while creating stars and interest. And it’s obvious where to start.

First and foremost, my proposal calls for a full 36-race points season. No more playoffs.

Any points reset makes the system too confusing; it takes the focus away from the top drivers by instead focusing on the cutoff line drivers, and it has not led to any fan increase.

NASCAR viewership has been cut in half; the 2014 season finale had 5.33m viewers on cable. The 2025 finale had 2.77m viewers on broadcast. Let’s not even compare the 2004 finale to the 2025 finale.

With that, it’s time to talk points. A lot of people really like the 1-point-per-position system. I don’t, because it disincentivizes drivers from racing for position in the top 10 and potentially wrecking out. Finished second really should not have a 35x multiplier on last place in a mathematical equation.

But again, people like the current point distribution. And this proposal is ultimately a compromise. So, I’m going to keep the current 40th to 2nd distribution model.

The difference from second to first cannot stay the same, however. There’s only a five point difference between second and first in the current distribution. This meager difference is because, in the current playoff system, winning means getting into the playoffs or advancing to the next round within them.

So there will just need to be more of a difference between first and the 35 points for finishing second. The current five point difference is less than that in the F1 system, and that’s one working with much fewer points overall.

But there’s a very simple solution to this: instead of 40 points for winning, why not 50?

This means second place gets 70% of the points that the race winner receives. F1 has a difference of 72%, so winning would mean more than in that seroes. At the same time, how many total points are in the NASCAR system means that consistency still matters a significant amount.

Finally, there’s one more problem to answer: what to do about stages? Personally, I think stages cause too many problems for the benefits they provide.

However, we’re asking a lot out of NASCAR and their TV partners to just crtl-alt-delete the playoffs. Stages are also a little more of a divided topic among the fan base.

This has to be a realistic proposal. So, stages will stay in some form.

But there won’t be extra stages at the 600. And there are going to be some other changes to stages in general.

Some like the idea of having no stage cautions. I don’t care either way. But the thing I do care about is more consistency in stage lengths.

NASCAR’s original goal with stages was to have the races broken down into 25%-25%-50%. Let’s go back to that. They strayed away from it due to teams trying to make it through one or both of the first two stages without pitting.

With Goodyear bringing higher wear tires, this is no longer an issue. And if it becomes one, who cares? There might be some strategy differences?! Oh my!

The top 10 in a stage do not need points. Too many people getting points mid-race is hard to keep track of. Instead, let’s make it that only the top three drivers in the stage get points, on a 5-2-1 scale.

F1 Sprints have a reduced number of points positions, and because of that, the back half of the field race at 80% as it doesn’t really matter to them.

How do we prevent that from happening? F1 pays teams at the end of the season. NASCAR pays teams every race for where they finish. At least $2,596,000 per points race last year, to be exact.

So, let’s take advantage of that and pay the entire field 25% of the race purse at the end of stage 1 and another 25% at the end of stage 2.

This way, teams have a reason to fight for every position, even if, on the surface, only the top 3 are actually getting points from it. The final results would have their payout cut in half, but that’s fine, as that’s when the vast majority of points are awarded on the day.

Will this proposed system save NASCAR? I don’t know, and it might not even be possible to “save” NASCAR at this point. But I do think nobody currently watching NASCAR would stop watching because NASCAR implemented this.

Does it reward winning a bit much? Yes, but we have to keep in mind that if it didn’t, the feedback loop would continue. The Bob Latford system faced a lot of criticism in the 1990’s because it did not promote winning enough, and honestly, it did not. We can’t get to a point where every decade, NASCAR completely changes itself in response to what it did before.

This system rewards winning enough to safeguard it from those criticisms in the future. It rewards drivers running up front in a better way than either Latford or the current system. It’s also remarkably simple to understand and is not a dramatic change from what NASCAR is currently using.

The NASCAR Cup championship has become devalued after years of abuse. Kyle Larson entered an exclusive club of multi-time champions, and instead that’s essentially become a footnote. Larson had a great, championship-caliber season, mind. But how he won it, through no fault of his own, defines this current playoff format.

It’s interesting that there is nostalgia for 1990s and 2000s NASCAR, but there is none for 2010s NASCAR. Part of that reason is time, of course, but part of it as well is that every championship season now bleeds into each other. Everybody wins it the same way now. Nobody wants to buy a bunch of books with the exact same setup and exact same conclusion. It’s all the same.

In this time of ChatGPT and AI slop, NASCAR could stand to become a little more original. This proposal is a great first step.