Kyle Larson was sitting in the best possible place to criticize NASCAR’s points system. He was leading the championship.

Not barely, either. After four races of the new 10-race Chase, Larson had won at Gateway and Kansas, finished second at Bristol and fifth at Darlington, and carried a 26-point advantage over Denny Hamlin into Las Vegas. He had also accumulated 58 stage points, more than anyone else in the Chase. If stage points were a problem, Larson was certainly not the driver being punished by them. He even made a reference to his own points in a tweet shared by Jonathan Fjeld on X,

“I don’t view my gap as anything”

That was what made his comments Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway surprising if not unusual. Larson was asked whether stage points had become too powerful in the new championship, and instead of defending the system that was helping him, he started talking about Ryan Preece.

Preece had finished 10th, 17th, 10th, and 10th through the first four Chase races. Three top-10 finishes in four races is hardly a championship-winning run, but it is the kind of consistency that should at least move a driver in the right direction over a 10-race championship. Preece had only eight stage points. Larson had 58.

Larson’s concern was not that Preece was secretly as good as him. He wasn’t. The difference between them was obvious. Larson had been exceptional; on the other hand, Preece had been respectable. What bothered Larson was what happened in between the green flag and the checkered flag.

A driver could spend a race around 11th, keep the car clean, work forward and finish 10th, while another driver could bank a stack of stage points, suffer a mechanical failure or get caught in a wreck, and still come away with a points total that was not far behind. Larson understood why NASCAR wanted to reward a driver for running well throughout the race. He just wondered whether the championship was rewarding that performance too heavily. He then distilled his opinion into a few memorable words.

“little participation awards in competition.”

The more important part was what came before it. Larson had also admitted that there was an upside to the system. A driver who runs at the front for most of a race should not necessarily have all of that work erased because something goes wrong with 20 laps remaining.

He was not arguing that stage points were worthless. He was arguing that, in a championship built around accumulating points for 10 straight races, the balance between stage performance and the final finishing position might be wrong.

At that point, it was an interesting argument. Then Larson went out and raced at Las Vegas. And the race gave him something far more useful than agreement. It gave him a problem.

The driver who made Larson notice

Ryan Preece is important here because his first four Chase races exposed the exact tension Larson was talking about. Preece entered the Chase as the 16th seed, so nobody expected him to erase that deficit simply by finishing in the top 10 a few times.

Still, there is a meaningful difference between failing to contend and consistently putting the car in a position to score. Preece had three top-10 finishes in the first four races, with only a 17th-place result at Gateway interrupting the run. His stage-point total, however, was just eight.

That was where the numbers started telling two different stories. Larson had 58 stage points after Kansas, while Hamlin had 46 and Bell had 44. Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney were at 45 each. Preece was sitting at the other end of that scale. The gap did not mean stage points were solely responsible for his position in the Chase, because they clearly were not.

Larson had been finishing dramatically better. But it did mean NASCAR was giving considerable championship value to something Preece was not particularly good at: being near the front when the stage clock ran out.

That is the distinction Larson was getting at. Finishing 10th three times is evidence of consistency, but it does not produce the same kind of points as repeatedly running in the top five or top 10 at the stage breaks and then finishing well. NASCAR has deliberately chosen to recognize both. The question is whether those two forms of performance are being weighted properly now that the championship has changed.

And this is where the history matters, because stage points were not invented for the championship NASCAR is running in 2026. They were invented to change the races.

NASCAR changed the race first. Then it changed the championship.

When NASCAR introduced stage racing in 2017, the problem was glaringly obvious. Too much of a race could become a waiting game. A driver sitting seventh with 150 laps remaining had little reason to risk a car for sixth if the real reward was waiting at the checkered flag. Teams could manage tires, fuel and track position knowing that the biggest points were still at the end.

Stages changed that calculation. The top 10 at the end of each stage received points, with 10 for first and one for 10th. Suddenly, seventh place mattered before the race was over. Tenth mattered too. A driver who was near the front for 150 laps could at least bank something if a late problem destroyed the finishing result. Just as importantly, the teams had another strategic decision to make and the drivers had another reason to race hard before the final stage.

It was a sensible solution to a racing problem, and that is why the stage system has lasted. But NASCAR has now put it inside a championship, and the question surrounding it has changed. After 12 years of elimination-style playoffs, the sport brought the Chase back in 2026 with a 16-driver field, no eliminations, and no resets during the final 10 races.

The drivers simply accumulate points, and whoever has the most at the end becomes champion. The value of a race win was also raised from 40 points to 55, while stage points remained worth 10 through one for the top 10.

That change is easy to overlook because the stages themselves look exactly as familiar as they did before. The championship underneath them is not. In the old playoff system, points existed inside a format built around advancing through rounds.

In this Chase, every point earned at Darlington, Kansas or Las Vegas stays in the same pile and carries forward to Homestead. There is no cutoff coming to erase the context. There is no reset waiting to wipe out the previous round.

That makes the value of stage points more consequential than it might first appear. NASCAR has essentially taken a scoring tool designed to make individual races matter and placed it inside a championship designed to reward the best 10-race body of work. Those goals can coexist, but they are not automatically the same thing. Larson was noticing that before hitting the pedal at Vegas.

Las Vegas was the test nobody could script

Since the comment was prospective, and the race is done, we can now look at it retrospectively. The South Point 400 gave us the perfect experiment because Larson’s race went wrong almost immediately.

He qualified sixth, then dropped eight positions during the opening run as the No. 5 Chevrolet fought an unexpectedly poor balance. The Hendrick Motorsports team made a major adjustment under green, and Larson spent 26 seconds on pit road while the crew worked on the car.

The long stop dropped him a lap down. He had no stage points to show for Stage 1, and for a driver who had been averaging huge stage totals on the 1.5-mile tracks, that was a significant hole to start digging out of.

The interesting thing was what happened next. The car got better, the team worked its way back into the fight and Larson recovered his lap. He managed only one stage point all afternoon, finishing 10th in Stage 2, but the lack of intermediate points did not stop him from becoming a factor in the finish. He eventually chased Chase Briscoe for the win and came home second after getting loose in Turn 4 and making contact with the wall.

That result was almost tailor-made for Larson’s argument. He was able to turn his day around. He entered Las Vegas 26 points ahead of Hamlin and left 40 ahead. He had gained 14 points on the driver who had started from the pole without collecting the kind of stage haul Larson had warned could distort the championship.

But then Larson said something after the race that made the whole discussion more interesting. He did not pretend those missing stage points were irrelevant. In fact, he said he had left “so many stage points” on the table and believed his lead could have been around 50 points if the car had fired off properly. Later, he described the afternoon as a missed opportunity despite being happy with the recovery.

That is the key to understanding Larson’s position. He wants the stage points when he earns them. He knows they matter. He knows that his championship lead could be even larger if he had collected them at Las Vegas. What he is questioning is whether a driver should be able to build that kind of margin from several points-scoring checkpoints inside races on top of the points awarded for the final result. And Las Vegas immediately gave a bang on argument against him.

Bell showed exactly why NASCAR wants those points

Christopher Bell finished 23rd. If all you knew was the finishing order, that would look like a brutal Chase race for the Joe Gibbs Racing driver. But Bell’s afternoon had been much better than the final number beside his name suggested. He finished second in Stage 1 and third in Stage 2 before a power-steering problem ruined the second half of the race. Those two stage results were worth 17 points, and they helped turn a 23rd-place finish into a 31-point day.

Bell still lost five points to Larson and fell to 55 points behind the leader, but the stage points kept the damage manageable. Without them, his championship position would have reflected the failure of the car far more heavily than the race he had actually driven before the problem arrived.

That is not some technical loophole in NASCAR’s rules. It is the entire reason stage points exist. Bell had demonstrated that he had a competitive car and was running near the front. The power steering failed. NASCAR decided that the earlier performance still deserved championship credit.

And I think that is where Larson’s argument needs to be handled carefully. Calling stage points participation awards makes for a great soundbite, but Bell’s Las Vegas race was not a participation award. He earned those 17 points by running second and third at the end of two stages. If NASCAR took them away, it would not be correcting an obvious injustice. It would simply be deciding that the final finishing position tells the whole story of a race, even when it plainly does not.

Larson’s Preece example says the opposite. A driver can finish well repeatedly without being particularly strong at the stage breaks, and the current system does not give that kind of consistency as much additional credit as Larson believes it should.

Both arguments are legitimate because they are measuring different things. That is the real conflict.

Briscoe made the case even harder

Then there was the winner. Chase Briscoe did not merely win Las Vegas. He won both stages, led 175 of the 267 laps and held off Larson’s late charge to take the race. He scored 75 points and gained 39 on Larson in the championship, moving to sixth in the Chase standings and keeping his title hopes alive.

This is where the argument for stage points becomes difficult to attack. Briscoe was the best driver at Las Vegas from beginning to end. If NASCAR’s scoring system had awarded him only the 55 points for the victory and ignored what he had done in the first two stages, it would have thrown away a substantial part of the performance that made him the winner in the first place.

So the problem is not that Briscoe received stage points. The question is what happens when that same scoring effect repeats itself over five, six, seven or 10 races.

One dominant race is easy to explain. A driver wins the race and both stages, so he gets rewarded heavily. But a championship is built from accumulation. Ten points here, eight there, another stage win the following week, and suddenly the intermediate results can represent dozens of points by the time the field reaches Homestead.

That is exactly what NASCAR intended when it introduced stages. The races were supposed to contain more meaningful moments.

Larson is asking whether NASCAR has allowed those moments to become too influential in determining the champion.

Hamlin’s Las Vegas race shows the other side of it

Denny Hamlin provides an even better example because he was in position to collect those points and then lost them himself.

Hamlin started from the pole and initially had one of the fastest Toyotas in the field. But with three laps left in Stage 1, he spun while trying to regain track position, finished the stage 28th and lost the chance to collect the points that had been sitting there for most of the opening run. He later battled back but finished 16th after another issue with fuel pressure.

Larson finished second. The result was a 14-point swing toward the championship leader, moving Larson’s advantage from 26 to 40 points.

There is no mysterious scoring distortion there. Hamlin had the chance to score stage points and lost them because of what happened on track. The finishing points then reflected the rest of his afternoon.

But it does demonstrate how quickly the system can turn one bad moment into a larger championship swing. Under the old idea of a race being decided primarily by its finish, Hamlin’s 16th would have been the story. Under the current system, the 28th-place Stage 1 result is part of the championship story too.

That is precisely what NASCAR wanted when it created stages. The debate is whether that remains the right emphasis now.

Logano has a very good reason to defend the system

Joey Logano’s response to Larson is important because he is not defending some abstract NASCAR rulebook. He has spent years racing under the different championship systems that have come and gone, and he remembers why stages were introduced in the first place.

The argument against Larson is straightforward: drivers spent years complaining that they could run near the front for most of a race, suffer an engine failure late and leave with almost nothing. Stage points fixed that. They also gave teams and drivers something meaningful to fight over before the final stint, which was one of the reasons NASCAR introduced them in the first place.

That history matters because NASCAR should not confuse a disagreement over championship weighting with proof that stage racing itself has failed. It has not. Stages changed the rhythm of races and gave teams another strategic problem to solve. There is a reason the sport has kept them for almost a decade.

Carson Hocevar has taken a similar position from another angle. His view is that NASCAR should let the new Chase breathe before changing it. Five races is not a large enough sample to decide that the scoring system is fundamentally wrong, especially when the leader has been so dominant that the standings themselves do not show evidence of some stage-point anomaly deciding the championship.

That is a fair warning. NASCAR has spent years changing formats, changing points and then changing them again. The sport does not need another knee-jerk correction because the first five races have produced an interesting argument.

But “leave it alone” is not the same as proving the balance is right. The rest of the Chase is where that answer will start to emerge.

The important number is not Preece’s position. It is the gap between the two kinds of performance.

This is where the discussion can easily go wrong. If someone says Ryan Preece would be a championship contender without stage points, the numbers do not support that. Larson has been vastly better. Preece’s 200-point deficit after Las Vegas is not the product of eight stage points. It is the product of Larson having two wins and five straight top-five finishes while Preece has one 17th among his four early Chase races and now sits last in the standings.

The useful comparison is much smaller. What happens to the gap when a driver consistently finishes well but does not score at the stage breaks?

That is the part Larson is questioning. Stage points are not creating Preece’s deficit, but they are one of the mechanisms determining how large that deficit becomes. The same applies to the drivers higher up the table. Every stage point is effectively another point that one driver has accumulated and another driver has not.

Motorsport’s analysis put the effect into perspective before Las Vegas: excluding the jump between first and second, each stage point is essentially equivalent to one position in the finishing order. That makes a 20-point stage haul the equivalent of moving 20 positions in the finishing points scale, although the exact value changes around the winner because of the 55-point race victory.

That is a lot of influence for something that happens before the race is over. Maybe that is exactly what NASCAR wants. But if it is, the sport should be comfortable saying so.

NASCAR has already made one major change in the opposite direction

The interesting thing is that NASCAR itself recognized that the race win needed more weight when it built the 2026 Chase.

A victory is now worth 55 points, up from 40. That was not a cosmetic adjustment. It was a deliberate attempt to make winning matter more while still keeping consistency at the center of a 10-race championship.

Larson’s 76-point Kansas performance showed how the pieces interact. He earned 55 for the win, 20 for taking both stages and one for the fastest lap. That was the maximum possible race total, and it turned his one-point advantage over Hamlin into 26 points in a single afternoon.

That is not a flaw in the system. It is the system doing precisely what NASCAR built it to do.

The more interesting question is whether NASCAR stopped halfway. It increased the value of winning but left the stage-point structure untouched. The result is a championship in which a driver can gain enormous ground by combining a strong finish with strong stage runs, which is exactly what Briscoe did at Las Vegas and Larson did at Kansas.

If NASCAR believes the final finishing position should carry more weight, it has several ways to make that happen without destroying stages. It could reduce the stage-point values. It could increase the difference between first and second. It could adjust the championship weighting after studying the 2026 data. None of those changes needs to mean stage racing itself was a mistake. The sensible approach is to finish the experiment first.

This is where NASCAR should resist the temptation to overreact

I would not remove stage points from the Chase after five races. That would create a more obvious problem than the one Larson is identifying.

The entire appeal of the 2026 format is that NASCAR has finally simplified the championship. Sixteen drivers start the Chase, the points are set, there are 10 races and the driver with the most points at the end wins. If stage points suddenly disappeared when the Chase began, NASCAR would have one scoring philosophy for the regular season and another for the championship.

That would be difficult to defend as a simpler system. There is also no reason to assume that stage points and the new Chase cannot coexist. Las Vegas showed why. Larson’s second-place finish mattered. Briscoe’s stage sweep mattered. Bell’s stage points mattered. Hamlin’s lost stage points mattered. All four drivers’ afternoons were represented more completely because NASCAR counted what happened before the finish.

The better question is whether the current values are right. That cannot be answered properly until the 10 races are complete.

Then NASCAR can look at the entire field and ask a much more useful set of questions. How many championship positions were materially changed by stage points? How often did the stage system correctly preserve credit for a strong race that ended badly? How often did it allow a driver with a worse finishing result to remain ahead of a driver who finished better? How large were those effects when the championship margins were tight?

That would tell NASCAR whether Larson has identified a genuine imbalance or simply found an interesting feature of the scoring system.

And Larson has given NASCAR the perfect first case study

The irony is that Larson may be the best person to make this argument because he is currently proving both sides of it. He has been almost absurdly consistent through the first five Chase races. He has finished fifth, first, second, first and second. His average finish is 2.2, and he is averaging 54.6 points per race.

He has not finished outside the top five. NASCAR’s own analysis now describes him as the standard in the garage. That means his 40-point lead does not need a stage-points explanation.

He is leading because he has been better. But Las Vegas also showed how much more he might have gained if he had been better earlier in the race. Larson himself said he had left stage points on the table and could have left the track with a 50-point lead rather than 40. That is not the language of a driver who thinks stage points are meaningless. It is the language of a driver who understands exactly how valuable they are and is questioning whether they should have that much power over the championship.

That is why I think the argument is worth following rather than dismissing. Larson has not exposed a broken scoring system.

He has exposed a tension inside the new Chase. NASCAR wants the championship to reward consistency over 10 races, but it also wants every part of every race to matter. Those objectives are compatible until the points begin deciding how much one kind of consistency is worth against another.

Preece is the driver who makes that tension visible. Bell is the driver who makes the stage system defensible. Briscoe shows why a dominant performance deserves a large reward. Hamlin shows how quickly stage points can magnify the consequences of a mistake. Larson has now demonstrated that a driver can lose almost all of the early-stage value, recover through the race and still gain on the championship field.

That is a much more interesting story than whether stage points are “good” or “bad.”

The first five races have not settled the argument because they were never going to. They have only shown us what the new Chase looks like when the old stage system is dropped into it.

Now NASCAR has five more races to find out whether the balance holds. If Larson keeps finishing first or second, nobody is going to be able to blame stage points for his championship lead. If the standings tighten, however, those little numbers beside the stage results are going to get a lot more attention. By the time the field reaches Homestead, the question may no longer be whether Larson was right to call them participation awards.

It may be whether NASCAR built a 10-race championship and then gave too much of it away before the race was even over.