The 76th season of the NASCAR Cup Series officially concludes Sunday afternoon with the 312-mile Cup Series Championship at Phoenix Raceway in Avondale, Arizona. The field will be full, but only four drivers will battle for the title after an exciting version of the NASCAR playoffs, which began on September 1 with nine races. The driver who finishes eighth in Atlanta and the top finisher in Phoenix on Sunday wins. A pedal to the metal version of the Final Four, all in one place. Talk about pressure.
Of course, the NASCAR postseason is nothing new. The series stopped awarding champions based on season-ending scores 20 years ago, and Kurt Busch won the first Chase for the Cup in 2004.
Since then, the playoff format has gone through several major changes, and while it lasted a long time, it never really flourished. It’s no secret that Chase in sports has failed to capture the hearts of racing fans. The prevailing opinion is that it is better to decide the winner the old-fashioned way. But more on that later. For now, here are the top five stories for Sunday and beyond in NASCAR.
1. The final four
Drivers chasing championships in Phoenix: Ryan Blaney, William Byron, Joey Logano and Tyler Reddick. Blaney is the current NASCAR Cup Series champion, while his Penske Racing teammate Logano is a two-time series champion in 2018 and 2022. Byron and Reddick (Michael Jordan owns 23XI) are on their way to their first championship.
Logano, 34, may be the toughest card in the division. The Connecticut native finished 15th in the regular season, but two of his three wins in 2024 have come in the Chase, and his time appears to have peaked. He won three races in 31 career starts at Phoenix, fourth most of any driver in the championship. The only victory on the one-mile oval belongs to Byron, who won the final race of the season last year.
2. Bad blood
One of the more interesting things coming up on Sunday is the potential paint trade between Blaney and Byron. For about four years, Byron had been dating Blaney’s younger sister, Erin. In a post-race interview at Martinsville last year, Byron even called Blaney “his brother-in-law.” It was a good family event.
But things may be different now. Garage scuttlebutt is that the couple are no longer together, and haven’t been for at least a good portion of this season. It might just all be a harmless rumor except for the conflict between the two drivers that boiled over at Darlington in May. During midrace action, Byron pushed the car of driver Martin Truex Jr. into Blaney, causing a wreck that damaged Blaney’s car and put him out of the race. The wreck prompted Blaney to explode at both drivers over his team’s radio: “I’m gonna go kill both those mother f***ers is what I’m gonna do.”
Blaney later walked back his comments. But there’s a chance that any lingering tension between him and Byron could come into play on Sunday in the most consequential race of the season for both drivers.
3.Farewell to Martin Truex Jr.
Truex retired from full-time driving after the Phoenix race, ending one of the most influential Cup careers of the playoff era. His journey in NASCAR was the definition of a slow build. He struggled in the Cup Series for decades before starting to find real success. From 2004 to 2014, Truex won a total of two races, but never finished in the top ten in the final event. “There were more tough years than good years,” he said in a recent interview with Fox Sports. “But those hard times make you who you are and make you appreciate the good times.”And there were many good times over the next 10 years. Truex has gone from eternal admirer to true star. He won the 2017 Cup championship, finished second three times and entered the final race with 34 series wins.
Now 44, he still plans to race occasionally, but said he wants to spend more time off the track than racing. “It’s very hard,” he said of life in the Cup. I wish they hadn’t printed the schedule a year in advance. The most important thing is to have time to do what I want and to be able to compete a little.”
4. Kyle Larson’s pain
The 31-year-old California native has been the best Cup driver this season. He won six of his best races, taking the checkered flag at speedways (Charlotte, Kansas, Las Vegas) and street circuits (Sonoma), as well as at two of the sport’s most famous venues, Bristol and Indy. He also finished in the top 10 in 17 of his 34 starts and led all drivers with 1,686 laps. From start to finish, he was a winning driver almost every week.
But he missed out on his fourth NASCAR championship after suffering a self-inflicted injury on the final lap of the chase. Las Vegas, Oct. 10. At 20, he made a pit stop mistake, and the following week at Homestead, the Hendrick Motorsports driver hit the wall on lap 2 due to a flat tire. None of the blows were fatal, but they caused him to fall. Two races were missing from the top ten races. Last week at Martinsville, he couldn’t find a finishing pace better than third. “We have a lot of bonus points, 20 points more than the next guy,” Larson said after Martinsville. “We had two bad races, I think a win would help us a lot. I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with my form. “You can’t have two bad races in eight rounds.”
5. Dissatisfaction with the Chase format
When NASCAR created the Chase back before the 2004 season, it was the fastest-growing sport in the U.S., a juggernaut that was supposed to someday compete with pro football on Sundays. But the Cup series’ postseason has never been able to draw eyeballs away from the NFL. Television ratings for NASCAR have been declining for 10 years, and last season’s championship race averaged just three million viewers. (The average NFL regular-season game in 2023, for comparison, drew 17.9 million viewers.)
The format has failed to catch on, but NASCAR has also failed to settle on a Chase that it can live with. First it was expanded to 12 drivers from 10, and then grew to 16 in 2014. That was when NASCAR broke the season’s final 10 into four rounds, with a winner-take-all race involving four finalists—the framework that still exists today, though stage points were added to the mix in 2017 in an attempt to reduce the volatility that the format engendered.
But there are still ways to game the system, and the shenanigans that marred the end of last week’s race at Martinsville exposed that fact. With Byron on the verge of falling out of the Championship 4, two other Chevrolet drivers who were not in the Chase—Ross Chastain and Auston Dillon—ran interference for him. Byron was further assisted when NASCAR disqualified a car from the championship that had made an illegal move to get into qualifying position. Even some of the drivers seem fed up.
With a format that has changed so many times, there shouldn’t be too much drama in another round of tweaks. Or, better yet, NASCAR could return its title fight to a season-long points affair. That’s still how Formula 1 and IndyCar do it. No shame in trying to get it right.
