5 Points to Ponder: How the 2026 NASCAR Points System Is Preventing Further Fan Gripes

1. What Tyler Reddick is Doing is Unprecedented

Consider this a test to see if people are just scanning the section headers here. When Tyler Reddick claimed victory at Darlington Raceway, it marked his fourth victory in the first six races of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, a startling accomplishment for a driver who had only eight total wins over his previous six Cup campaigns.

Only two others have pulled off a similar feat, and they’re both titans of the sport: Dale Earnhardt did it en route to winning six of the first eight races in 1987, en route to a career-high 11 wins and the series championship. Five years later, Bill Elliott bounced back from a 27th-place finish in the Daytona 500 and reeled off four straight victories, though he would not win again until the season-ending event at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Both Hall of Famers won at Rockingham Speedway, Richmond Raceway and Darlington along the way, with Earnhardt adding North Wilkesboro Speedway, while Elliott’s additional win came at Atlanta. Neither of them can claim the same diversity of track types as Reddick.

The No. 45 has found victory lane at a pair of drafting tracks which race a bit differently from each other, a road course and Darlington. That spread notably doesn’t include a short track, which is probably why Reddick himself joked that “the world’s gonna end” if he wins at Martinsville Speedway this weekend.

The fate of the world may depend on what Tyler Reddick does at Martinsville next week.

"If I can win there, oh my gosh, the world's gonna end." pic.twitter.com/4jKAb1ShXL

— Steven Taranto (@STaranto92) March 23, 2026

The other part of that self-deprecating quip is that Reddick has not fared well in his prior trips to Martinsville, so if his current mojo extends there too, look out. It’s often hard to compare accomplishments across eras or even give credit where it’s due while something like Reddick’s run is playing out. But while it might not quite match Earnhardt for the hottest start to a Cup Series season ever, it’s well past the point of being a fluke and has now turned into something even longtime NASCAR fans have never seen before.

2. Should We Also Be Talking More About a Reddick Teammate?

Unlike Reddick, his 23XI Racing running mate Bubba Wallace enjoys springtime in Martinsville, coming home ninth or better with two top fives over the past three years. What’s different as the Cup Series heads there this time is how much early success he’s enjoyed, sitting third in points after six races.

Until an incident not of his own making (and ironically kicked off by one of his team’s co-owners, Denny Hamlin) ruined a good day at Darlington, Wallace hadn’t finished worse than 11th this season. It was the first such stretch of his Cup career, a promising sign for a driver for whom consistency has always been an arch nemesis.

Reddick’s heroics mean Wallace has done it while flying mostly under the radar, a rarity considering how he’s often a focus for fans, haters and broadcasters. He’s also notoriously self-critical, and some of his most famous post-race interviews have been of the “Man, I let myself and my team down” variety.

It’s of course not impossible that Wallace may stumble through some subpar outings and we’ll see that side of him return. Still, a driver who has spent years very publicly fighting his own self-doubt looks very much like someone who belongs toward the front of the field weekly, and that’s worth filing away to see if it can hold up over the next few months.

3. One Sign That NASCAR Listening to Fans Paid Off

This was the first Darlington race that featured the increased horsepower, reduced downforce package that many fans, teams and journalists, including yours truly, were begging NASCAR to try. Last year’s spring visit to the track was widely panned as one of the worst races of the season (only 45.9% of voters said it was a good race in Jeff Gluck’s poll, the fourth-lowest total of 2025), so this was a case of almost any change being worth a shot.

So far, so good. Third-place finisher Ryan Blaney called the package a “handful,” but sounded like he meant it as a compliment since it forced drivers to manage their cars a bit more. Carson Hocevar spoke highly of his ability to pass cars while on his way to his own top-five performance.

It’s certainly too early to declare victory, and the true tests are arguably coming over the next two weeks. Short tracks are where the Next Gen car has often produced depressingly dull racing, with the spring Martinsville and Bristol Motor Speedway races near the top of the list.

But we should take heart that Darlington gave us a race where raw speed, tire management and strategy all appeared to play a part in a winning formula. That’s an encouraging formula, and if it can help make things better at a track where the product was often pretty good, maybe it can make a difference where it is darn near broken too.

4. On the Other Hand, Maybe It’s Good NASCAR Showed Some Restraint in Some Places

When NASCAR was considering changes to how it decided champions for 2026, it had a number of options to consider. It could have stuck with the playoffs or landed where it did with the return of The Chase. It could also have gone with the sporting equivalent of the nuclear option and returned to full-season points, an idea that a non-zero percentage of fans expressed support for on social media during the offseason.

The primary talking point for the full-season points crowd is that it was silly for someone to be one of the 16 drivers fighting for the crown based on a single victory at any point in the season. They also didn’t like the idea that a driver could dominate all year and then be aced out with a single off day in November, or what we now call the Connor Zilisch Corollary (OK, not really, but we should).

Off the strength of his four wins, Reddick has a 95-point lead over Blaney under the 2026 points system. If NASCAR still used its pre-2004 season, his lead would be nearly double that, and it would be Chase Elliott, not Blaney in second.

“So what?” you might say. Full-season points are supposed to reward consistent excellence, and Reddick’s efforts through six races fit that definition like a glove.

It also illuminates a potential issue with a full-season points system: There might not be much drama left by the fall. Playoffs make wins late in the calendar worth too much. Full-season points mean a hot streak like Reddick is on in the early spring makes a gap almost seem insurmountable just a month into the season.

And as an aside, do we really want Elliott, he of zero wins and no real challenges for any so far, sitting second instead of Blaney, who has a checkered flag and has seemed like a more consistent threat?

Call it a hunch, but the suspicion is that if NASCAR had just reverted to its old points system, people would be complaining about it now, too. We’ll see how things turn out under the first season of The Chase v.2.0, but right now it feels like a compromise was the right call.

5. Daniel Suarez Getting Bounced From Trackhouse May Have Been a Blessing in Disguise

When Daniel Suarez lost his ride with Trackhouse Racing at the end of 2025, it was hard to see it as anything but a downward trajectory for his NASCAR career. Wherever he ended up was almost certain to be a downgrade, or so the thinking went at the time.

Fast-forward until now, and it’s looking quite possible that the consensus was incorrect. Suarez did not make the playoffs in his last and worst season for Trackhouse, but he’d make The Chase if it started today in his debut campaign for Spire Motorsports.

This is the first time since 2022 that Suarez managed two top fives in the first six races of a season, and he’s so far managed to avoid calamitous stretches of DNFs that have so often plagued him in the past. Meanwhile, Trackhouse looks lost: Ross Chastain is 20th in points, Zilisch looks every bit the rookie and Shane van Gisbergen, the team’s best performing driver, saw his road course winning streak end.

There are other drivers who ended up in better situations than it first appeared after getting fired from a desirable ride, but none in recent memory quite like this situation is playing out so far. There’s a lot of racing still to go in 2026, but if Suarez is able to outperform all the Trackhouse cars all year, that would end up as a narrative few would have seen coming.