NASCAR News: No playoff format changes before 2026

NASCAR has decided that there will be no changes to their playoff format for 2025, instead they kicked the can down the road to give more time to study it.

“I don’t think we want to get in the habit of making small little tweaks every season to the playoffs,” John Probst, NASCAR’s executive vice president, chief racing development officer, said during the annual preseason rules briefing held at the NASCAR R&D Center in Concord, NC.

“Where we landed was for 2025 not making any changes to the playoffs. Throughout the course of this year, we will get a working group together with some media folks, OEMs, Goodyear, drivers. … We probably talked to most of the folks one-on-one about, where are we at? What are we thinking?

Three Schools of Thoughts for Playoff Format:

Loves it and the storylines it produces
Hates it, wants it to go away
Generally likes it; wants changes but doesn’t know what

“Basically, we look at that as a workstream for a group of our stakeholders this year, to look at it holistically.”

“The playoffs were meant to create those moments, which I feel like they did,” Probst said. “And on the other hand, there’s the fan feedback — which we hear loud and clear — on this particular driver should have been here, or that particular driver won this many races, so he should have been automatically in and all of that.”

In a November state-of-the-sport address, NASCAR president Steve Phelps said: “We are always looking if there are opportunities for us to tweak something.”

“We’re not going to go away from playoffs,” added Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR’s chief operations officer. “We’ll absolutely look at what form the playoffs take in the offseason. You always learn. … But playoffs in and of itself, as Steve said, you cannot argue with the quality of racing that the playoffs have delivered. You can talk about the format if we do some different things, but absolutely we’re going to stick with it.”