NASCAR playoff format debate: Should wins, regular season mean more?
As Joey Logano continues to celebrate his 2024 NASCAR Cup Series championship, the question remains: Should NASCAR revamp, or at least tweak, its playoff format?
Logano was the first driver who finished 15th or worse in the regular season to make the Championship 4 let alone win the title. His championship generated the discussion on whether the regular season should mean more.
With the Next Gen car appearing to have increased parity, does even more of an emphasis need to be placed on wins during the 26-race regular season and/or the 10-race playoff that is divided into three three-race rounds to produce four drivers eligible for the title in the season finale.
"The message we're trying to send is make the regular season matter more," said team owner and driver Denny Hamlin. "Those 26 races — it's proving to not be that substantial to winning a championship, and that's not something you want.
"My message to NASCAR would be, ‘Make the regular season worth more.' ... Because right now, over the last three years, you would say that the champion didn't really have to do much in the regular season, and that's just probably not good."
Logano won one race in the regular season but then won three in the playoffs. Two years ago, when he won the title, he finished second in the regular season with two wins but then won two more times in the playoffs. Last year, his Penske teammate Ryan Blaney won once in the regular season but then twice in the playoffs.
The last time a driver with the most wins during the regular season won the title came in 2021 when Kyle Larson had five regular-season wins and then won five more races in the playoffs. That was the last season of the previous generation car before NASCAR went to the Next Gen, where all of the chassis and many other parts come from a single-source supplier rather than the teams building them.
"The points format should be reflected on wins, and the tiebreakers should be the final race, and that should be it," said 2012 Cup champion Brad Keselowski. "I have a hard time as a competitor and a fan of the sport, understanding how drivers with the most wins routinely don't win championships.
"I just don't think that feels right to me."
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In other sports, the team with the most wins doesn't win the title. But Keselowski said with all drivers racing against each other all year, the comparison isn't really the same.
"We're not the NFL," Keselowski said. "We keep getting caught up in comparisons to other sports."
Keselowski noted that media partners like the playoff format. The fan base does seem to be split. NASCAR says the playoffs will stay in some form — the playoff format started 20 years ago after Matt Kenseth clinched the title with just one win and one race remaining in the season when drivers' points earned throughout the entire season determined the champion.
"We'll absolutely look at what form the playoffs take in the offseason," NASCAR Chief Operating Officer Steve O'Donnell said last month during the season-ending race weekend at Phoenix. "You always learn. ... You cannot argue with the quality of racing that the playoffs have delivered.
"You can talk about the format if we do some different things, but absolutely we're going to stick with [the playoffs]."
Blaney said he would prefer two five-race rounds with 16 drivers to open the playoffs and then cut it to eight drivers for the final round. He would give more points for wins and thinks that would keep things to where they will be competitive throughout. He said teams will always adapt to the format.
"I would like to see a group of races to end the year to where you're not going to have anyone run away with it," Blaney said. "In three to five races, and you're still going to have some really good competition going on.
"I'm not like I am standing on the front lines wanting this playoff thing to change. It is what it is. I think there's maybe tweaks they could think about."
Roger Penske, who owns the Logano and Blaney teams, also owns the IndyCar Series, which still bases its champion on points earned over the entire season. Its championship (at 17 races) went down to the final race this year. Formula 1 enters its season finale 24th race of the year this weekend with its champion decided at Las Vegas with two races remaining.
Penske noted that Team Penske won 10 of the final 24 events of the year when counting the all-star race and the win by Harrison Burton at Daytona for Penske affiliate Wood Brothers Racing.
"We all signed up for a point system at the beginning of the year, didn't we?" Penske said. "And that's what we operate on. We've been around where there's been changes many different times.
"We'll let NASCAR take that one on. If they think they need changes, fine. But I guess when someone says you win three in a row, they've got to change something."
Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.
