The Chase Has No Eliminations. The Math After Las Vegas Is Starting Its Own.

NASCAR built the 2026 Chase without a single elimination. Nobody gets cut after three races, nobody gets a win-and-advance lifeline, and all 16 drivers carry one running total to Homestead-Miami on Nov. 8. That’s the rulebook. The arithmetic after Las Vegas is starting to run its own cut line anyway.

Chase Briscoe swept the South Point 400 for the maximum 75 points, and Kyle Larson still left Nevada 40 points clear of Denny Hamlin. Five races remain. Under the 2026 format, a win pays 55 and each stage win pays 10, so no driver can score more than 375 points between now and the finale. For the bottom of the table, that ceiling is already low enough to bump your head on.

Here’s the full board, what every Chase driver took out of Vegas, and the weekly rate each one needs to outscore Larson just to pull level.

Twenty is the number to remember

Outside of the bigger win bonus, the 2026 points table is the familiar one: second place pays 35. So the difference between winning and finishing runner-up, with no stage points involved, is 20. That’s the cleanest yardstick in this Chase, because it’s what a driver gains in a week where he beats Larson to the line and Larson does his usual thing.

Five drivers sit inside that 20-point window. Hamlin needs to beat Larson by eight points a race. Christopher Bell needs 11. Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney and Briscoe sit between 14 and 17. For all five, a run of wins over a Larson who keeps finishing second would be enough, give or take stage points.

From Tyler Reddick down, the required rate is over 20. Reddick (21.2) and Ty Gibbs (22.0) can’t close the gap simply by beating Larson every Sunday. They need him to have an off day, or they need to collect stage points he doesn’t. That isn’t elimination. It’s dependence on somebody else’s bad luck, which in a no-cut format is the same conversation with better manners.

Larson hasn’t been handing out bad luck. NASCAR’s numbers have him at a 2.2 average finish through the first five Chase races, every one of them a top five, and he’s gained 95 points on Hamlin over that stretch. The drivers below him are chasing a consistency streak, not a points leader having a wobble.

Three drivers are already pressed against the ceiling

Try a scenario that’s generous to the chasers. Larson scores 36 points in each of the last five races, exactly what he scored at Vegas, a day on which he picked up a single stage point and limped home second with right-side damage after hitting the wall on the last lap. He finishes the year on 2,498.

Now hand the bottom three a perfect Chase: five wins, ten stage wins, 375 points apiece.

• Daniel Suárez: 2,123 + 375 = 2,498. Level with Larson, not ahead of him.
• Chris Buescher: 2,122 + 375 = 2,497. One short.
• Ryan Preece: 2,118 + 375 = 2,493. Five short.

In other words, Buescher and Preece cannot beat a Larson who repeats his damaged-car Vegas result five more times, even if they win every stage and every race left on the calendar. Suárez can only tie him. Nobody has been mathematically eliminated, but those three are now racing for something other than the championship unless Larson’s run of top fives breaks badly.

One tier up, Chase Elliott, William Byron and Carson Hocevar still have room on paper. A perfect run would carry Elliott to 2,530. But each of them needs to outscore Larson by more than 31 points a race, more than one and a half times the gap between a win and second place. That requires Larson to finish deep in the field at least once, probably twice.

Vegas reshuffled the middle, not the top

Briscoe’s 75 got the headlines, but the race’s second and third-biggest Chase hauls went to Team Penske. Austin Cindric finished fourth with 48 points after leading 33 laps. Blaney started 20th, led 10 laps and finished fifth for 47. Reddick took 41 and Bubba Wallace 39.

Larson’s 36 ranked sixth among the 16 Chase drivers. His lead grew because the man directly behind him had a worse day. Hamlin started from the pole and led 39 laps, then lost the lead when crew chief Chris Gayle pitted him under the first caution, a call Gayle said afterward he probably shouldn’t have made. Hamlin spun from fourth with three laps left in Stage 1, damaging the splitter, and lost fuel pressure around lap 170. He finished 16th with 22 points. Gibbs, 17th, scored 20 and slid from sixth to eighth.

Bell’s afternoon is the best argument for stage points in this format. He lost power steering, finished 23rd a lap down, and still scored 31 points because he’d banked 17 in the stages. He dropped only five points to Larson on a day that would have been a disaster under a finishing-order-only system.

Preece took the biggest hit. He finished 28th, three laps down, with nine points, lost 27 to Larson and fell from 14th to last in the Chase.

One Chevrolet, six Toyotas

Sort the top 10 by manufacturer and the title fight looks lopsided in two directions at once. Toyota has six of the top 10: all four Joe Gibbs Racing cars in the top eight, plus both 23XI entries. Ford has three, all from Penske, while RFK Racing’s Buescher and Preece occupy the last two spots. Chevrolet has exactly one car in the top 10. Its next-best is Hocevar’s Spire entry in 11th, 158 points back.

That cuts both ways. Toyota has the most chances, but its contenders keep taking points off one another; Briscoe’s win came at the direct expense of Hamlin and Bell on the same day. Hendrick’s title hopes ride entirely on the No. 5, but Byron and Elliott aren’t irrelevant. They finished sixth and seventh at Vegas, ahead of Hamlin, Gibbs and Bell. Every spot a Hendrick teammate takes from a Toyota contender is a point Larson doesn’t have to earn himself.

What to watch at Charlotte

Race 6 is the Bank of America 400 on Sunday, Oct. 11, and it’s back on Charlotte Motor Speedway’s 1.5-mile oval for the first time in the postseason since 2017. That makes it the second straight intermediate track, the track type where Hamlin has built his strongest record. If he’s going to start cutting into an eight-points-a-race deficit, Charlotte is the kind of place it has to happen.

Keep an eye on the weather. Three of the first five Chase lineups were set by NASCAR’s metric after qualifying was lost, and the formula weighs the previous race’s finish at 70 percent and owner points at 30 percent. A washout in Concord would put Briscoe and Larson near the front and push Hamlin and Bell back into traffic, the same trap Kansas set for the Vegas grid.

After Charlotte come Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville and the Homestead finale. Talladega is the obvious place for Larson’s streak of top fives to end, and the one race where a driver from the bottom of the table can steal a 75-point day without having been fast all season. For Hamlin, the number to beat is eight points a race. For Preece, it’s simpler and less comfortable: Larson has to have trouble, more than once.

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Elle Puckett

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Elle Puckett covers Formula 1, IndyCar, and endurance racing, with a focus on championship analysis and long-form storytelling.

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