Chase Elliott rates his own NASCAR Championship | Sports News

NASCAR followers criticized the Cup Series postseason for feeling more like a actuality show than a championship, long earlier than Kyle Larson’s title win final season, which noticed late-lap heartbreak for Denny Hamlin. Fellow Hendrick Motorsports driver Chase Elliott feels the new format improves his possibilities of profitable.

That type of format by no means suited followers, NASCAR legends, and Elliott, whose profession has been constructed on stacking stable weeks of good performances as an alternative of creating viral moments for social media.

NASCAR formally launched its new playoff format that includes a 10-race postseason decided by complete factors as an alternative of round-by-round elimination, and Elliott views the change as useful. “I think if you based it on historical performance, sure,” Elliott mentioned when requested about his championship possibilities.

“But performance last year doesn’t always carry over. For me, the way we finished the season, I felt like we were getting into a place where I was confident.” Under the revamped system, the highest 16 drivers from the primary 26 races qualify for the postseason, and the champion is set by cumulative factors over the ultimate 10 races.

Race winners now earn 55 factors as an alternative of 40, inserting a premium on outright velocity with out guaranteeing playoff success by way of victories. Elliott’s 2025 season reads like a case examine in why this shift favors drivers like him.

He completed eighth within the standings with 2,310 factors, recording two wins and a regular string of top-10 and top-five finishes that have been usually overshadowed by inconsistency elsewhere. He additionally earned victories at Kansas and Atlanta, with high finishes at Dover, Martinsville, and Sonoma. Elliott was hardly ever invisible, even when he wasn’t dominant.

“I do feel like you have a bigger sample set and more opportunities to string together more races and it not be so choppy,” Elliott mentioned. “I liked my odds before, but I like my odds now for sure.”

Despite his confidence within the workforce’s talents, Elliott shared his considerations in regards to the new playoff format. He argued that a 16-team discipline is simply too in depth for a championship and urged that lowering the playoff discipline to a smaller measurement would create a higher expertise.

“I think if I had one complaint of any of it, I think 16 is just too many,” he mentioned. “I thought the 10-driver piece of that was really hard to get into. I still think 16 will be a challenge, but to me, I think it’s the perfect compromise.”