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Kyle Busch Questions Why NASCAR Is Returning To The Chase Points Format

February 2, 2026  ·
  John Trent

Kyle Busch made it very clear he’s not a fan of the return to the Chase points format that NASCAR will institute this year after doing away with the playoffs.

NASCAR announced its return to the Chase in the middle of January with NASCAR President Steve O’Donnell stating, “Where we’ve landed, candidly, the Chase is back. We are going to back to a format where on the Cup side the first 26 races will be based on [a] points system and the final 10 races will make up the Chase.”

The Chase will include 16 drivers in the Cup Series. As for how the points will be set in the Chase for those drivers, O’Donnell explained, “The points leader will go into the Chase at 2100 points. It was important for us to have a bonus for that leader. So they’ll have a 25-point lead over second place, and a 35-point lead over third place, and positions beyond that will go down by 5 points.”

As for why NASCAR decided to return to the Chase, O’Donnell said it was about getting “back to who we are. That’s the core of NASCAR and want to launch this and we’re really excited about the 2026 season.”

In a separate statement shared on NASCAR.com, O’Donnell said, “The biggest thing was looking at who we wanted to be as a sport going forward, and that included really a focus on our core fan base and who had been with us for a long, long time and gotten the sport to where it was. So we wanted our future format to reflect that. A lot of things you’re going to see and how we talked to the fans, from an overall NASCAR standpoint, was going to really embrace that hardcore fan, and so we felt like the format needed to absolutely reflect that.”

Busch shared his comments on the return of the Chase with SiriusXM NASCAR Radio saying, “I thought we got it away from it for a reason in the past. So I’m not sure why we went back to it.”

“The reason why we sort of went away from it was, obviously, Jimmie Johnson’s dominance, number one,” Busch continued. “But I feel like number two is there were times where guys like myself who would have one bad race or two that would then knock them out of the championship, basically.”

“I finished third one year. I finished fifth another year just from having a wreck in one race. Like Talladega. You get caught up in a wreck and you can’t make up enough points to get back to the championship, but you’re going to finish third in points,” he explained. “I got wrecked at Kansas one year and that put me fifth in the championship, I think. It’s just stuff like that I don’t really agree with it.”

“But with the racing the way that it is today and everybody running over everybody all the time, you might see everybody, all 16 of us, have a bad race. So if all of us have a bad race then that can sort of be construed as a throwaway, but you have to be good in the other nine. Who’s to say? We don’t know. We’ll see how it plays out,” he said.

From there, he predicted how teams will approach the Chase, “But obviously everyone is going to look toward the regular season and maximizing all the stage points and points racing basically. That lends itself to having to qualify good on Saturdays in order to be up there, up front holding on to your track position for the first stage. Getting that first stage points. That’s probably our number one hold back with RCR is that we don’t tend to qualify good and hold on to the first stage points. That’s where we really get hurt throughout the season. It’s just our stage points and how much we have there. We’ve got to get better on all that. So we’ll see.”

The NASCAR Cup season starts with the Daytona 500 on Sunday February 15th with coverage beginning at 2L30 PM on Fox.

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Author: John Trent