There are four races remaining on the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series regular season calendar, and 13 drivers have found victory lane so far this year following Bubba Wallace's breakthrough Brickyard 400 victory at Indianapolis Motor Speedway last Sunday.
Considering the fact that these final four regular season races consist of two short oval races, a road course race, and a superspeedway drafting race, plus the fact that seven full-time drivers who won last year have not yet won this year, there is still an outside chance that there end up being 17 different winners before the playoffs begin.
Whether or not that happens, the playoffs are capped at 16 drivers.
Which NASCAR winner could miss the playoffs?
The 16 playoff spots officially go to the regular season champion and the multi-race winners, with all remaining spots taken up by the single-race winners. If there aren't enough single-race winners to fill the postseason field, points determine which non-winners get in.
On the flip side, if there are more single-race winners than remaining playoff spots, the tiebreaker among the single-race winners to determine who gets in and who doesn't becomes points.
Trackhouse Racing's Shane van Gisbergen is the lowest among the winners in points, as he sits in 27th place, but he has won three races, so he has locked himself in. Among single-race winners, the lowest driver in points is Wood Brothers Racing's Josh Berry, who finds himself in 21st, 25 points below the next lowest, Team Penske's Austin Cindric, in 17th.
Should four more winners emerge from now until the regular season finale at Daytona International Speedway in a few weeks, Berry could be in trouble, despite having won at Las Vegas Motor Speedway back in March.
Technically, you could argue that two single-race winners could be at risk, since there could still be a winless regular season champion, but with the top non-winner in the standings currently being 23XI Racing's Tyler Reddick in sixth place, 71 points out of the lead, we're going to take for granted that that doesn't happen.
Of course, if someone from below Berry wins between now and the end of the regular season, they could run that very same risk of not getting into the field. But with nine non-winners ahead of him in points, there is more of a chance that any new winners will come from that pool, rather than the one below him.
That said, anything is possible; last-place Harrison Burton won at Daytona to punch his playoff ticket last year, and there are currently 14 winless drivers below Berry in the standings hoping to do the exact same thing at some point over the next four weeks.
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