The New Format Two Weeks In
I was wrong. Or at least I have been so far.
I can admit it. With the change from the Playoffs to the Chase format in 2026, my immediate concern that whoever won the regular season championship would have a smooth ride to turning that into the overall Cup, O’Reilly Auto Parts and Craftsman Truck Series championships. Gone would be any chance for an underdog story or a prize fight mentality during the playoffs. It would be ten weeks of watching the regular season champion put more and more of a points lead and just waiting for the season to end. Basically, it would be the ten-race equivalent of a road course.
But, to quote Billy Joel, “something happened on the way to that place.” Namely two races in the Cup and O’Reilly Series. You might expect some chaos at Darlington but did someone throw a curse on Worldwide Technology Raceway? With a massive pit row wreck during the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race and brake issues galore during the Cup race, WWT Raceway (or Gateway as it is sometimes known – I’ve heard it pronounced both ways!) wasn’t the chance for the regular season champions to drive away from the field.
As of Monday afternoon, Cup Regular Season Champion Denny Hamlin is still leading in the Chase but Gateway winner Kyle Larson is only nine points behind and Southern 500 winner Christopher Bell is only 18 points back. In the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, things are even more jumbled. Regular Season Champion Justin Allgaier has fallen to second to Darlington winner Sheldon Creed. The points difference is only three points. From there, Carson Kvapil is in third and only nine points back. Jesse Love, who took the RCR #2 Chevrolet to victory lane at Gateway, is fourth and 16 points out of the lead. There’s a four-way battle for fifth place but any of them (Sam Mayer, Austin Hill, Sammy Smith and Corey Day) could conceivably vault into the playoff picture with a win.
The Craftsman Truck Series hasn’t even started the Chase portion of their season yet. They will start things off at Bristol this Thursday with Layne Riggs with a 25 point lead over Kaden Honeycutt. But what will that point picture look like on Friday morning?
Don’t get me wrong. I think if Denny Hamlin doesn’t win the Cup championship, NASCAR fans, pundits and the blue checkmark brigade will spend this winter with a repeat of last year: decrying the Chase and demanding a return to the full-season points system. And there’s nothing that says that Hamlin, Christopher Bell or Larson couldn’t win three or four races in a row and by Homestead, the championship has been all but decided. For now, however, it’s been a much more exciting Chase than I was expecting. And I am big enough to admit that.
Carson vs. Ty and NASCAR’s Double Standard
Speaking of last year’s post-season, one of the complaints about the former Playoff system was that it robbed NASCAR of the chance to tell stories. I whole-heartedly disagree (Jeff Gordon winning at Martinsville and heading to Homestead with a chance to win a championship in what we believed would be the final race of his career, the Joey Logano/Matt Kenseth feud, the Brad Keselowski/Jeff Gordon feud, to name just three). Certainly, however, there were a lot of stories at Gateway: Kyle Larson breaking his losing streak, Chase Elliott and Ryan Blaney (among others) having brake issues. Heck, even Alex Bowman finishing second in a race he dedicated to his dog, Finn, was covered coming out of the race.
But I noticed that two stories weren’t really discussed too much after the race. The first: Zane Smith’s status after his own brake failure sent him into the wall. Yes, Front Row Motorsports put out a statement to say “Zane’s okay but he’s not talking” but there’s been no follow-up by NASCAR media sites. (It’s possible it got buried in the Gateway race recap.) I like Zane (I will probably reference him later in this post) and have since he was running in the Truck Series. He’s one of those drivers that doesn’t get a lot of headlines but he deserves better when he was obviously injured than to be ignored.
However, it’s the second story that I want to focus on. For the week leading up to Gateway/Worldwide Technology Raceway, NASCAR was doing all it could to milk the contact between Brad Keselowski and Carson Hocevar, even creating faux fight posters to further the feud.
Let’s get the facts straight first. Hocevar bumped Keselowski during the Southern 500, not unlike what happened between Bubba Wallace and Austin Dillon earlier in the race. Unlike Dillon, however, Keselowski was loose and began to spin, at which point Hocevar, instead of lifting, maintained his speed. Keselowski spun in front of Hocevar and was turned into the wall. Hocevar did not “finish him off” in the words of analyst Jeff Burton. Also, unlike what happened between Wallace and Dillon, NASCAR took their current favourite whipping boy (or Ross Chastain 2.0) and once again made some money and ratings from him.
I get Brad being mad (hey, it rhymes) but he of all people should know what it’s like to be under that magnifying glass. After all it was a little over 10 years ago (give or take a couple of years) that he was in the same position that Hocevar is now. Every week it seemed like someone, from Matt Kenseth to Jeff Gordon, was wanting a piece of him post-race.
I also understand that NASCAR wants to cash in on any dissention between their drivers. As Kevin Harvick once said “this sport was built on fights” and anyone who has seen the endless replays of the 1979 fight between Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison after the Daytona 500 can’t help but agree. However, it seems in recent years that NASCAR’s media seems to pick their sides. As I stated earlier, both Brad Keselowski and Ross Chastain have filled that role in recent years (to say nothing of the likes of Ernie Irvan and even Dale Earnhardt, Sr. back in the 80s and 90s) and the media have forced that role onto Hocevar now. If there’s a way to blame something on him, the media will jump through hoops to figure out the way. (In a way, it’s not unlike the media covering politics.)
As a Hocevar fan, perhaps I am biased. I’m also frustrated because during the Gateway race, Ty Gibbs was upset with Erik Jones, leading to Gibbs spinning Jones out. This was not an accidental tap. This was a deliberate action because Gibbs decided Jones wasn’t racing him the way he should be raced.
The outcry? Non-existent.
No investigation by NASCAR. No poster. No t-shirts. No discussion of retaliation. Even in discussing the incident, analyst Steve Letarte had to reference Hocevar albeit to say that if Hocevar had done something similar, he would have been condemned for it.
Instead, NASCAR media basically said “It’s over. It’s a non-story. Let’s move on.” Of course, this is the same reaction that Gibbs got for wrecking his own teammate Brandon Jones at Martinsville in 2022. (Why the hell Jones came back to JGR is a question I’d love to have answered?)
Sadly, I think we all know why Gibbs, racing for the super team of Joe Gibbs Racing, gets a free pace while Hocevar, racing for the mid-level Spire Motorsports (a team in a lawsuit against JGR) is painted as a menace on the track.
johnmilner.ca 