Fire on Fridays: It Should Be Difficult To Make The Chase After Missing Time

To say that the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season has been a disaster for Alex Bowman would be underselling it.

Crashes in the first two races of the season put him in an early points hole, and after having to step out of the No. 48 midrace at Circuit of the Americas after suffering symptoms of vertigo, Bowman sat dead last in points among full-time drivers after three races.

Bowman’s points deficit to the rest of the field increased when he had to sit out at Phoenix Raceway last weekend, and it will increase again March 15 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway as he misses his second consecutive race with vertigo.

There’s no timetable for Bowman’s recovery or his return to the No. 48, but it’s clear that when he does make his triumphant return, he’ll have a long, long road ahead of him to qualify for The Chase.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

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If a wait and see attitude is good enough for Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr., maybe it should be for the rest of us too.

If the year was 2025, a driver in Bowman’s position would only have to do one thing to qualify for the postseason: win.

In the former system, a driver could miss 25 races or finish last in every single race through mid-August. But as long as a driver had one first-place finish in the first 26 races, their slate was wiped clean and they were competing for a championship.

Winning is no easy task, but teams had a free pass to putz around for the remainder of the regular season, no matter how good or bad they were, as long as they were top dog for one week. We now have a driver (Brad Keselowski) on record saying that he was given lesser equipment in the past when he was locked into the playoffs and his teammates weren’t. In a series where every driver races each other for 36 weeks on 26 unique tracks, the idea of taking weekends off never felt right.

But now that win-and-you’re-in is gone and it’s a matter of being top 16 in points after 26 races to qualify, there’s no time for anyone to take their foot off the gas. Every race counts.

The new format is a tough break for Bowman and any future drivers that will miss time, but missing a few races in the regular season is not a death sentence. It makes Bowman’s chances of making The Chase improbable, but not impossible. And any driver in his position needs to show over the course of 26 races — not just one — that they are worthy of competing for a title.

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So what does Bowman have to do to qualify for the 2026 Chase in his current position? That’ll first depend on how many races he’ll miss before his return, but we can look at the regular-season standings in previous years to see what points total he has to aim for by the end of August.

Adding 15 extra points for race wins, the following drivers were 16th in points after the 26th race of the season in the four prior seasons of the Next Gen era.

To be top 16 in points by the end of the regular season, a driver that runs every race needs to score roughly 577 points, which is just over 22 points per weekend. Twenty-two points is a 15th-place finish with zero stage points. It can also be a 25th-place finish with 10 stage points or a 35th-place finish with 20 stage points.

Averaging 22 points per race isn’t too daunting, but Bowman will have to average far more than that once he returns to have any chance of making The Chase.

He scored 23 in the first three races, which means that he’ll need 554 points once he returns to reach the Next Gen era average of 577 in the regular season. At the bare minimum, Bowman will miss two races. If he returns for the sixth race of the season at Darlington Raceway, there will be 21 races left in the regular season, so he will need to score 26.38 points per race to reach 577.

Twenty-six points per race is an 11th-place finish without stage points, a 21st-place finish with 10 stage points or a 31st-place finish with 20.

If Bowman misses five races, he’ll need to average 30.78 points in the remaining 19 races. Thirty-one points per race would be an eighth-place finish with zero stage points, an 18th-place finish with 10 stage points or a 28th-place finish with 20.

If he misses 10 races, his playoff chances are effectively over. He’d need to average what is essentially a second-place finish with seven stage points for 13 consecutive weeks.

The odds aren’t pretty for Bowman, but his championship hopes are far from finished as things currently stand. His road to racing for the title is far more difficult this year than it would’ve been last year, but no matter the circumstances, no one should be able to earn a get-out-of-jail-free card and wash away a disappointing year with a single race win.

In a points system where every regular-season race matters, it should take nothing but week-in, week-out excellence to overcome a difficult start. And depending on when he gets back behind the wheel, it’s excellence — and a Chase berth — that are still well within reach.

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