The field prepares for a restart during the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2025. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
For eight straight years, the NASCAR Cup Series Most Popular Driver award has been the least suspenseful item on the banquet agenda. Chase Elliott won it every season from 2018 through 2025. This year’s ballot opened Friday morning without his name on it.
NASCAR’s announcement said Elliott, who drives the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, took himself out of consideration in honor of Kyle Busch, the two-time Cup champion who died May 21 at age 41. Busch, who won 63 Cup races, is on the Cup ballot alongside 34 other drivers. The announcement carried no new quote from Elliott explaining the decision, so the reasoning is the sport’s framing and nothing more. What is on record is how Elliott spoke about Busch at Charlotte two days after his death, when he described a competitor who raced the right way.
The result is a fan vote with no incumbent, and the mechanics deserve more attention than they usually get.
A shorter window, the same five-ballot cap
Polls opened at 9 a.m. ET on Oct. 23 and close at noon ET on Monday, Nov. 9, the day after the Cup finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. The winner will be revealed Nov. 10 at the NASCAR Awards banquet in Miami. Last year’s vote ran from noon on Oct. 6 to noon on Nov. 3. That is roughly 28 days then and about 17 now, so organized fan bases have close to 40 percent less time to rally.
The rules themselves have not changed. Each ballot selects one driver, and fans can submit five ballots per day per email address, split among drivers however they like. Assuming the cap resets daily, that works out to a ceiling of about 90 ballots per email address across this year’s 18 calendar days, versus about 145 across last year’s 29. That is my arithmetic, not a NASCAR figure. The point is that a per-email cap rewards fans who show up early and every day, which makes a compressed window a turnout contest.
Two winners since 2003
Elliott’s eight awards trail only his father Bill Elliott (16), Dale Earnhardt Jr. (15) and Richard Petty (nine). Earnhardt won 15 straight from 2003 through 2017, and Elliott picked up the next eight in a row. Put those together and two drivers, Earnhardt and Elliott, have won every Cup vote from 2003 through 2025. A contest that has had one answer for more than two decades is now an open question.
The easy read is that the award simply passes to the next fan favorite. The more useful read is that the 35-name Cup ballot has no reigning winner on it for the first time since 2017, and the vote has to sort itself out in about 17 days.
What to watch before the banquet
NASCAR says it will post top-10 and top-five updates before the winners are announced. Those lists are the only public signal of where the vote is heading, and they will shape late voting. Last year’s top 10, published Oct. 15, ran alphabetically rather than by rank, so don’t assume this year’s first list will show an order. The bigger unknown is how much support goes to Busch’s name on the ballot, a number the later updates may hint at.
Elliott’s Hendrick teammate Kyle Larson is busy with a bigger fight, and Backfire Racing has tracked it from Las Vegas to the Phoenix tire failure. We also looked at Larson’s Kyle Busch tribute livery at Las Vegas. The calendar from here is short: the Cup finale at Homestead on Nov. 8, voting closes Nov. 9, and the Miami banquet settles it Nov. 10.
Lead image: The field prepares for a restart during the South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2025. Photo: TaurusEmerald / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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