Denny Hamlin has opened the Chase for the Championship with finishes of 18th and 9th but remains the points leader primarily because of the 16 stage points he earned at Darlington Raceway two weeks ago.
Naturally, there is a subset of the NASCAR fan base that believes Hamlin should have been punished for those results. They claim tradition and purity, an emphasis on race results over where a driver ran throughout the entire race, and at two arbitrary parts of the Southern 500.
The argument left Hamlin incredulous. He laughed and said this was only coming from his detractors.
“I mean, come on, man,” Hamlin said. “Now we're arguing something different, like, just stop complaining for one week. That's what (this format) was built around. We worked with NASCAR on this for quite a while and we came up with the stages, then we came up with, how to reward them.”
The idea behind stage points is that it seemed unjust for a driver to dominate a race but suffer some kind of misfortune in the closing laps and get nothing for it.
In other words, if purists say it was unfair for a driver to win every race but lose the championship in the final four format, it was also unfair for a driver to lead every lap but not be compensated for doing so.
“So, the reason that they gave points the way they did, and awarded them the amount that they did at certain points of the race, is to reward a driver for their greatness if they go out and run the table,” Hamlin said.
“That is what is great about this format, that even with four or five races to go, if someone is 100 points out -- all it takes is running the table for a couple of races, and you’re right back in it.
“I think that it's going to make it far more compelling, and it's also going to reward those that perform great for an extended period of time. I think that the amount that the stages are rewarded are fair to the total amount that you get for the end of the race.”
This is certainly how Kyle Larson suddenly finds himself in the championship mix. In fact, no one has benefited more from stage points than Larson this season. No one has scored more stage points in 2026 than the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 team.
It was the difference between his seventh seeded starting point in the playoffs and one where he would have started outside of the top-10. It’s the difference between being nine points out and over 30 points behind Hamlin entering the Bristol Night Race.
“I think this format really rewards consistency,” Larson said. “But I guess it rewards consistency throughout the whole race, where I think if we really wanted to get back to the authentic part of our sport that we used to have, I think going off of just finishes would be the most authentic way to crown a champion at the end of the year.
In other words, he’s one of those purists, even as he benefits from this format.
“This is coming from somebody who is up there in stage points, as well, throughout the season,” Larson said. “Without stage points, we would be further down. I don’t even know if we’d be in the Chase without stage points.
“So, yeah, I think I’m open to it. And I don’t know if they would make a change or not while still having stages, but yeah, I think stages, they seem to just be crazy important, which it is what it is.”
Ryan Blaney, who has also benefited from stage points despite a 35th place finish at Gateway, is just 33 points behind Hamlin. He’s an advocate for stage points because of exactly what happened to him at Gateway.
The 2023 champion had a race winning car but suffered a brake failure and ultimately scored the 21st most points on Sunday.
“When stage racing was introduced, the idea that when I learned that we were doing this was, ‘oh good, you're going to get rewarded a little bit if you're running up towards the front throughout the race and you have a problem at the end and you don't finish good’, like if you blow up or get in a wreck,” Blaney said.”
Or lose a brake rotor on the frontstretch …
“So I like the idea of being rewarded for running well through the race,” Blaney said. “Now you can counteract that with, ‘well, that shouldn't matter because the end of the race is the finish and you should get points off of that.’
“So I don't know. I mean, we all race to what it is now. Everyone knows stage points are incredibly important. Everyone's fighting for them. So I don't really have an opinion on that too much. We go through this cycle of we make a change, we think it's good for a little bit and then the outside world gets sick of it and they're barking for a change.”
Brad Keselowski likes the value of stage points, and even cited the bonus point for posting the fastest lap as a value too.
“It actually feels pretty good to me,” Keselowski said. “Like I said, that doesn't mean there aren't any opportunities to make it better but I don't feel like there's any big injustices there.”
Keep in mind that NASCAR also increased the value of winning races this season too. Winning pays 20 points more than second place, which is why both Larson and Christopher Bell were able to made wide leaps into championship contention when combining their wins with stage points.
It gives someone like William Byron, currently 114 points back, hope that he can still make a run should they simply win races and amass stage points.
“Winning is the easiest way to do that,” Byron said. “But this format rewards consistency so we need to qualify, score stage points and win races. If you do that, you’re going to close the gap pretty quickly.”
Chase Briscoe appreciates that stage points, in his words, can ‘Band-Aid’ a bad finish.
“I don’t think it needs a lot of work,” Briscoe said. “The whole point of this was to encourage us to race hard all race, and to reward teams that ran well from start to finish. That’s what the champion should be in my mind.”
Carson Hocevar called stage racing ‘a gimmick’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad thing.
“I mean, it’s keeping the championship tight,” Hocevar said. “It’s still early in this Chase but if you had this format with stage racing 10 years ago, I don’t think we would have needed the knockout elimination format.
“Stage racing keeps it way closer than it would be without just the finishing order. It creates a lot of intensity all race. If you’re further back in the standings, you can make up a lot of points on a guy if he gets knocked out early and didn’t score any stage points, especially if you can win the race and score stage points.
“So, I think stage points are kind of a gimmick, and controversial, but I think those stage points could be really crucial once everyone gets to Homestead. I think it kind of works, and I haven’t come across any better way to decide the champion, and gimmicks don’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, right?”
Ultimately, Blaney says he doesn’t care, and he will race to whatever the format requires of him on any given year.
“I think those of us in the garage could care the least about it,” Blaney said. “We know what it is and we go race to whatever format or whatever point system they give us. Y’all tell us the rules at the start of the year and we just go race with it.
“I do know that stage points are really important. We put a lot of emphasis on it. If they weren’t, we would focus more on the end of the race. But really, I could go either way on that subject.”
