NASCAR Championship Recap: Something’s Got to Change Fast

The last race of the current playoff format left a sour taste in just about everyone’s mouth.

Last week, Kyle Larson won his second NASCAR Cup Series Championship at Phoenix International Raceway in a dramatic overtime finish. Pretty much everybody is mad about it (but nobody’s actually mad at him). The myriad reasons why are a microcosm of NASCAR’s continued tailspin into irrelevancy, and offer a sad commentary on the state of America’s premier motorsport.

At some point during NASCAR’s early 2000s boom years, the powers that be decided that the product simply wasn’t good enough. Pay no mind to the fact that tracks were packing seats as fast as they could build them and tuning in on television in record numbers – something needed to change, because the folks in the front office wanted to attract a mythical creature known as the Casual Race Fan™.

Nobody has ever met this supposed “Casual Race Fan™” in person. Many folks, this author included, are inclined to believe that no such race fan exists. Racing is, by its very nature, a very technical sport, and there are far too many moving parts – literally and figuratively – for someone to glean much of any enjoyment out of the action without some deeper understanding. That didn’t matter to NASCAR. They were convinced that millions of these unicorns were wandering through a wretched existence, wholly unaware that something called NASCAR exists.

In NASCAR’s eyes, all they had to do to attract these folks was wildly overcomplicate their points system, twisting a sensible season-long format into a contrived, arcane cross between March Madness and the World Series. Along with other rules, such as stage racing and green-white-checker “overtime” finishes, the actual result become something akin to WWE crossed with Mario Party.

As it turned out, Casual Race Fans™ never showed up. Traditional fans were alienated and pulled away. TV ratings slipped, tracks tore down grandstands, and NASCAR’s moment in the national spotlight gradually faded away like a mid-packer who stayed out on old tires too long.

It’s why, in 2025, fans need a half dozen subscription services to chase after the series over the course of the year. It’s why the championship celebration got pushed off network TV to a streaming service. It’s why you have truck broadcasts from a studio hours away from the track. It’s why the sport has no real superstars. It’s why a deserving champion’s moment of triumph feels illegitimate.

Back in the early 2000s, we had Dale Earnhardt, Jr. on MTV Cribs. We had Jeff Gordon hosting Saturday Night Live. Now, William Byron flies commercial to save money and he’s somehow able to do so almost completely incognito.

According to the current format, elder statesman Denny Hamlin did everything right on Sunday.  He drove his tail off and left nothing on the table when it mattered most. He had the fastest car by far and lead the most laps, all for a blown tire with three to go to add that element of “suspense” (read: contrived Mario Party-esque randomness) that cost him a long-awaited, well-earned, heel-turn championship in this current format.

Your sister’s favorite driver, Ryan Blaney, was one position away at Martinsville from winning his second championship at Phoenix.

If we’re going by the classic Winston Cup points format, young gun Christopher Bell would be celebrating his second straight Cup championship.

If we’re going by the current points system in a full-season format, dirt ace Kyle Larson would still be celebrating his second Cup championship, and he wouldn’t be giving lukewarm postrace interviews stating “we didn’t lead a lap all day” and “we need to focus on getting better this offseason.”

All of these drivers could be – should be – superstars. We should see them in TV commercials, on billboards, and hosting awards shows. Most importantly, people like your neighbor, your pastor, and your mom should want to tune in to see who is going to triumph next Sunday afternoon.

As it stands now, though, nobody knows who any of these drivers are. I don’t hear regular people talk about NASCAR the way they talk about football or baseball. If they do, the conversation tends to start and stop with something to the effect of “Yeah, I used to watch NASCAR until they started with that playoff crap.” I’ve had this exact conversation, dozens of times, with friends, family members, coworkers, and complete strangers I just met at a party. The experiment has failed. The gimmicks have failed to grow sport. The Casual Race Fan™ does not exist, and if they ever did, this format has rendered them utterly extinct. T

My wife, Bethany, is a relatively new NASCAR fan, seeing her first race late in the 2021 season. She’s a mom, a mental health counselor, and an avid gardener. She makes hand-sewn stuffed animals in her spare time. She watches all six Lord of the Rings movies every year. She is, on paper at least, exactly the type of “atypical” NASCAR fan the sport is trying to attract. She even helped me write a guide for new fans of the sport earlier this year.

Two things she said last Sunday stuck with me. After AJ Allmendinger‘s nasty Lap 149 crash, she said “it looks like he broke his toe link.” I know this woman pretty well. I can say with certainty that when she sat down on a whim to watch the 2021 Southern 500 with me, she had no idea what a toe link was, let alone what it did or how it would look when it was broken. After four and a half seasons, she’s in deep. For anyone at NASCAR reading this, they should be thrilled that they managed to hook someone that hard.

When the checkered flag fell a couple hours later, she turned to me and said “So all we had to do all season was watch the last five minutes of this race?” She’s looking forward to the offseason. At this point, she’s not thinking about Daytona at all. Let’s hope, for the sake of the sport, that NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell‘s promise of a major format change is enough to convince millions of fans like Bethany to sit on the couch again in February.

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