After Jesse Love's win at Phoenix Raceway in the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, you might have noticed something interesting about the standings in both of the sport's top two levels. Both of them are currently being led by the same drivers who won the championship last year.
But that's impossible, right? With the change in the postseason format, the title race was supposed to favor different types of drivers. And the two in question each went winless during the regular season.
It's almost as if... wait for it... teams take different approaches to the championship under different formats.
Jesse Love and Kyle Larson are both destroying the full-season points revisionism crowd's favorite cope in real time
Even though Kyle Larson blew a tire in Sunday's Cup race at Phoenix and finished 34th, he still leads the points by five markers over Christopher Bell after a six-race stretch in which he won twice and finished no worse than sixth. Combined with Love's surge, it has both drivers in position for back-to-back titles.
The way Larson won the championship last year was undoubtedly fortuitous. Denny Hamlin was cruising to the win and the title until William Byron had a tire go down with three laps to go, and the No. 5 team won the race off of pit road. But this is about 2026, not 2025.
Hendrick Motorsports has been notorious for saving its best until it matters most. We saw it throughout Jimmie Johnson's dynasty run. We saw it in 2020 with Chase Elliott. And until this past weekend, we've seen it with Larson this year, a driver who is perfectly capable of stringing consistent results together (contrary to popular belief) when things go right for him.
It was a similar story with Love, whom fans acted like had stolen a prized painting from the Louvre for winning last year's O'Reilly title instead of Connor Zilisch (something absolutely nobody will care about once they've each had 15-to-20-year Cup careers). He just had the right car on the right night, and that's all there was to it.
Oh, what's that? He's in position to repeat? Well, that sure complicates the narrative a little bit.
Perhaps the ultimate vindication that teams are approaching this championship differently is a driver who isn't leading the points, that being Joey Logano. For the first half of the season, everybody was dancing on his grave. Then, he and Team Penske woke up, and the three-time champion finds himself well within striking range with three races to go.
Yes, under the format that requires peak performance for 10 weeks.
Make no mistake. If we used a full-season format, the same teams and drivers who knew how to capitalize on the playoffs, who've now shown they can capitalize on the Chase, would capitalize on that too. It's just the way the sport works.
Throughout the entirety of playoff era, we had to hear about how such and such were the "real" champions in a given season because they scored the most points all year. But these arguments always fell apart with context.
Now, we have concrete evidence.
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