NASCAR Cup Series 2026

The championship's first race was run on 19 June 1949 at Charlotte Speedway, and the division was then called Strictly Stock: road cars, barely modified, the same ones you could buy at a dealership. That is where the name still used for the whole sport comes from — stock car — even though not a single bolt of that survives.

Television made the leap. In 1979 the Daytona 500 became the first stock car race broadcast live, flag to flag and nationwide, on CBS. That Sunday it stopped being a south-eastern American concern.

On the roll of honour there is a three-way tie. Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt and Jimmie Johnson share the record with seven championships apiece, and none of the three has been matched since. Johnson's has a further wrinkle that is hard to repeat: five in a row, from 2006 to 2010. Among manufacturers there is no argument: Chevrolet has 851 wins, more than anyone.

With three laps left in the last race of 2025, at Phoenix, Denny Hamlin was champion. He had won six races that year, more than anyone, and only had to manage his position. Then William Byron — also racing for the title — punctured and hit the wall, the safety car came out and the race went to overtime.

On that restart Kyle Larson pitted for two tyres instead of four, gained the track position he needed, passed Hamlin and finished third. That third place won him the championship, the second of his career. The race itself, incidentally, was won by Ryan Blaney, who had nothing at stake.

Byron, who had been regular-season champion, ended up fourth overall; back in February he had won his second consecutive Daytona 500, something only five drivers have ever done. All of it — six wins, nine months of consistency and two five-hundred-mile races — fitted into one pit-lane decision with three laps to go.

NASCAR has dismantled the format that produced afternoons like that. The four-driver final disappears and the classic Chase returns, the one used between 2004 and 2013: the top sixteen after the first twenty-six races enter the final phase, the win-and-you're-in rule is scrapped, and starting points are staggered by the regular-season standings. Playoff points also go, as does the regular-season championship as a title in its own right.

The change is structural, not cosmetic. For a decade the system was designed so the last race would decide whatever happened, turning nine months of work into an afternoon of chance. With staggered points, whoever arrives on top arrives with a lead on the board.

And the car is touched too. Power rises from 670 to 750 horsepower at circuits under a mile and a half and on road courses, and several ovals switch to the short-track aero package instead of the intermediate one. Less downforce, more power and cars that are harder to drive where the overtaking happens.

Thirty-six points races, from the Daytona 500 on 15 February to the Homestead-Miami finish on 8 November, plus three non-championship events. Almost all of it is ovals — thirty-two — with three road courses and one street circuit.

The loudest return is North Wilkesboro, a North Carolina short track paying points for the first time since 1996: thirty years away for one of the championship's founding venues. In exchange, the All-Star Race held there moves to Dover.

The rest of the map shifts too. Chicagoland is back after six years out, the Coronado street course in San Diego makes its debut, and Charlotte's autumn race leaves the roval to be run on the oval. Mexico City drops out, squeezed by the football World Cup calendar.

And the finish leaves Phoenix for Homestead-Miami, which had not settled a championship since 2019. From now on the venue of the last race will rotate.

The current car is the Next Gen, the category's seventh generation, on track since 2022. It brought stock cars things that came from circuit racing and had never been seen here: centre-lock wheels instead of the traditional five studs, a rear diffuser and a common platform for all three marques, with many single-supply parts.

That shared base is what explains the championship. Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota compete with chassis and components that are largely identical, so the difference between teams is played out in set-up, in drivers and in the pit lane, not in having more money to build a better part.

For 2026 it is adjusted on three fronts. Power rises to 750 horsepower wherever the circuit is short or twisty. Superspeedways get a four-inch spoiler. And the A-post flap becomes mandatory at every race — the part that lifts when a car starts to turn sideways and keeps it from flipping: a direct answer to the rollovers the Next Gen had been producing in the ugliest accidents.