For the first time since Jimmie Johnson won five consecutive NASCAR Cup Series championships from 2006 to 2010, the Cup Series has a back-to-back champion. After a winless regular season, Kyle Larson, the driver who replaced Johnson at Hendrick Motorsports in 2021, put it all together when it counted over the final 10 races of the season.
It may not have had the feel of a Championship 4 title decider, since NASCAR's move back to the Chase postseason format did not come with the same previous guarantee of a Game 7 walk-off moment, and the fact that Larson clinched the championship after the end of a stage will surely have the stage racing critics talking this coming offseason.
But by clinching his third championship in Sunday's season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, Larson continued to add to his already illustrious resume. With his outstanding 10-race championship run, he once again solidified himself as NASCAR's current best, as he continues to move up the list of all-time greats as well.
Of course, we've heard the noise (all year, and in all 12 years of the Championship 4, and in all 10 years of the Chase before that...) about what the standings "would have looked like" under a full-points format.
But what about if NASCAR had simply kept the "win and in", knockout-style Championship 4 format around for another year?
Who would have won a 2026 NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4?
Larson wouldn't have won it in 2026, and neither would full-season points leader Denny Hamlin. Hamlin was one of two drivers, along with Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Christopher Bell, who technically entered Homestead still with a mathematical chance to catch and pass Larson for the crown.
People get tired of hearing it, but we need to include it whenever we talk about hypotheticals: yes, we know that drivers would have raced differently under different formats. That's kind of the point, to see how things would have looked had everything else actually remained equal.
It means nothing. It's still entertaining to look at. Now, moving on.
Let's start with who would have made it in.
Without completely regurgitating the information shared in our past articles, the round of 8 would have consisted of Larson, Bell, Hamlin, Tyler Reddick, Ryan Blaney, Chase Briscoe, Joey Logano, and William Byron, with Byron being the big surprise on points since he was actually only 14th in season-long points and 14th in the Chase standings when the round of 8 would have started (with four races to go).
Reddick won at Phoenix Raceway, Larson won at Talladega Superspeedway, and Byron earned his first win of the year at Martinsville Speedway in the three would-be round of 8 races.
Hamlin would have advanced on points, nine markers ahead of Logano. Some may consider that a surprise, seeing as how far he finished behind Larson in the standings, but the fact is that his so-called Chase "collapse" wasn't nearly the "choke" you were supposed to think it was.
He actually extended his full-season points lead over the regular season's second, third, and fourth place drivers, from the start of the postseason until the end of it.
Under the Championship 4 format, the championship winner would have simply been the highest finisher (of the four remaining drivers) in the season finale.
Reddick finished the race in second, just ahead of Byron in third, and would have won the championship. Hamlin was sixth and Larson was 12th.
And yes, it would have been deemed controversial by the portion of the fanbase that considers things controversial whenever it's convenient to do so. Just like it was when Larson beat Hamlin following a late caution in 2025.
Byron held the race lead until a late caution, the first non-stage-ending caution all race. He retained the lead in the pits, but Reddick passed him on the race track.
Blaney ultimately won the race (just as he ironically did in the 2025 season finale, despite missing out on the Championship 4 then too), but Reddick's second place finish would have earned him the title.
Of course, as we said, this assumes all other things remain equal; we doubt Larson would have, as he put it himself, driven "like an idiot" had the championship not already been clinched.
Reddick finished third in the season-long standings and was ultimately fifth in the Chase standings, although he did lead the series in wins with six, matching the Next Gen era record (2022 to present). He earned three of those wins in a row to start the season, something no driver had ever done before, and had five of them after just nine races.
The 2027 NASCAR Cup Series season, which is set to use the same postseason format that was used in 2026, is scheduled to get underway on Sunday, February 21 with the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway, with live coverage set to be provided by Fox.
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