Regular Season Championship battle heating up with five races remaining

SPEEDWAY, Ind. — In the eighth year of the current NASCAR championship format, the Regular Season Championship battle has never been this tight among a handful of teams. It makes every point that much more valuable.

Entering Sunday‘s Brickyard 400 (2:30 p.m. ET, NBC, IMS Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App) at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the top four in the regular-season standings are separated by a mere 20 points. With a mammoth 54-point outing last weekend at Pocono Raceway, Denny Hamlin‘s runner-up finish chopped off 22 points to the lead, now held by Chase Elliott.

Elliott passed his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Kyle Larson, who has had a stranglehold of the top spot for much of the 2024 season. For No. 5 team standards, Larson had a ho-hum day at Pocono, tallying 29 points.

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With a pair of runner-up finishes, Tyler Reddick has erased 49 points to the lead, spanning the last four races. He enters Indianapolis third in points, 15 markers out. Not far in the distance are drivers like William Byron (57 points out) and Martin Truex Jr. (-63).

Ryan Blaney has scored a pair of wins during a summer surge and knocked nearly 50 points off in that timeframe (-76).

The battle is on.

“There‘s still a lot of racing left, is kind of how I look at it,” Elliott said on Friday at IMS. “A lot can happen in that period of time. It‘s going to force all of us to be really good. You‘re going to have to be really solid. You‘re probably going to have to win a race or two between now and the end of it to have a legitimate chance without other guys having problems, which I don‘t really see four or five guys having a ton of issues between now and then.”

There is a wide variety of race tracks filling the final five races in the regular season. It begins with the return to the famed Indianapolis oval for the first time since 2020. After a two-week break, the series returns to a .75-mile short track at Richmond Raceway which will feature optional tires. Next up is the blistering fast Michigan International Speedway before wrapping up with a wild card at Daytona International Speedway and the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.

Hamlin believes the remaining five races are in the No. 11 team‘s wheelhouse, as 14 of his 54 career wins have come at Richmond, Michigan, Daytona and Darlington.

“We definitely have potential to win it,” Hamlin said with a laugh. “Good tracks coming up for us. It‘s going to be a race against execution for ourselves. That will be the biggest thing — and your Daytona finish will play quite a big factor as well.”

Race strategy will be an essential element in determining who will wrap up the regular-season title. The No. 11 team scored the most points it has all season last weekend at Pocono. By finishing fourth and earning 14 stage points, Byron‘s 47 points were tied for the third-most points he‘s had during a race in 2024.

Both of Byron‘s HMS teammates — who are also in the battle — believe the No. 24 team has a fighter‘s chance to earn 57 points and 15 playoff points.

“[We] need to put more races together like [Pocono] and have 40- to 50-point days and you never know how far you can climb up with those kinds of days because they are hard to get,” Byron said. “This sport is really top-weighted, so if you start putting together top fives in the stages and in the race, it‘s pretty impressive.”

Ultimately, it boils down to execution. Reddick leads the series with 14 top-10 finishes, and his 11.7 average finish only trails Chase Elliott (10.5). In just its fourth season as a team, 23XI Racing has a legitimate shot at winning its first regular-season title.

“It would just be cool to [win] it, honestly,” Reddick said. “To have those playoff points would be a big deal for us, only winning one race so far at Talladega. It‘s a huge sense of accomplishment for the whole team, being that this is year four to the team and be contending for it is a big deal.

“Those playoff points will go a very long way. We‘re in the hunt for some amount, but it‘s right there for the taking so we might as well make the most of the opportunity.”

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Previously, 2023 was the closest four drivers had been at this point in the season, though a hefty 75 points still separated those four drivers. In the first season of the Next Gen car, Elliott had a 105-point lead and cruised to the regular season title. He knows how much of a prized possession those 15 points can be, as that carried him all the way to the Championship 4 at Phoenix Raceway in 2022.

“There was no shot we were ever making the final four without the amount of points that we accumulated,” Elliott added. “We fortunately had a really good first half of the year.

“We just had a really good first half of the year. And then we ran really bad those last eight-and-a-half weeks. Without those points, we would have been long out of it, in my view. … So they can mean a lot. You hope that you‘re running good enough that you don‘t need them, is the goal that everyone has. But you know, to have eight straight weeks that nothing goes wrong, is probably not realistic.”

Elliott (2022) and Larson (2021) are the only drivers in the top five in points that have previously won a regular-season title.