Through the first five races of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season, Christopher Bell has won three of them. Yet at no point has he been the points leader.
Instead, because he got wrecked in the Daytona 500 and had a loose wheel at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, he’s 29 markers behind William Byron.
It’s worth noting two things here. First, as mentioned above, it’s been only five races. If Bell remains this dominant throughout the year, he’ll almost certainly attain and maintain the points lead. Secondly, once everything is reset for the playoffs, all that will matter are playoff points, which Bell owns 16 of – 10 more than the next closest competitor.
Of course, the playoffs come with their own issue: a season as dominant as Bell’s, should it prove to be sustainable, can be erased by one stretch of bad finishes at the wrong time. Something needs to change, and that something is the points system NASCAR uses on a week-by-week basis.
It's been in use since 2011, and though the 2017 introduction of stage points has helped reward in-race performance to compensate drivers with bad finishing luck, there remains a lack of separation between positions.
In NASCAR's points system, the difference between the total awarded to second and third place is one point. The difference between fifth and sixth place is also one point. The difference between 10th and 11th place is, also, one point. The difference between 35th and 36th place? You guessed it: one point.
The only exception to this is the race winner, who receives five more points than the runner-up. It’s still not enough.
Many fans argue for the importance of consistency, but the problem with that mindset is it condenses the field so that a great result – such as a win – is no more helpful to a driver’s standing than a poor result is harmful.
Given the fact that we've established those poor results are often a product of rotten luck rather than a lack of skill, it has to be recognized that maximizing gain is significantly more impressive than minimizing loss.
Furthermore, when one treats both concepts as of equal value, it will inherently make minimizing loss more valuable for the field’s top drivers. Because those drivers’ poor finishes deviate further from their standard than their wins do, the full-season points leader will end up being largely determined not by whoever demonstrates the highest level of excellence on the track, but rather whoever has the fewest hiccups.
This is completely backwards from how it should be, and most other racing series have solved this predicament by distributing their points on a curved slope of intervals as the value of each position increases.
In IndyCar, wins are worth 50 points while second place is worth 40. That's the same difference as that between second and fifth, which is worth 30, and the same difference between fifth and 10th, which is worth 20. Formula 1 is even stricter, going 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 for the top 10 while nobody else receives points at all.
NASCAR does not need to become IndyCar or F1 in regard to its on-track product, but it would benefit to take notes in designing a points system. Every position should matter at least a little bit, so let’s take a page out of IndyCar’s book, but extrapolate it for NASCAR’s larger field sizes.
Those 50 points for winning an IndyCar race would fall somewhere towards the middle of the pack for NASCAR, while the curve would continue to steepen for the added spots at the front of the field. The winner, ideally, should receive somewhere in the ballpark of 200 or 250 points at the minimum.
The best part about using a system such as this is it would serve the same purpose the playoffs were designed to serve, but while still allowing every race to matter equally.
The playoffs, originally the Chase for the Cup, were instituted after Matt Kenseth won the 2003 championship with one single race win and the 11th most laps led of any driver, while Ryan Newman won eight times and finished sixth. That would never have happened under a better format, one designed to reward running up front and winning rather than "racing not to lose".
Many in NASCAR’s brass have hinted that changes may be coming to the playoffs in 2026. The best solution is one that’s radical, yet also simple: fix the full-season points system. There's no reason why one unlucky break should cancel out an entire month of winning.