When the NASCAR All-Star Race was born in 1985, the pitch was simple and included twelve cars. And only the previous season’s race winners were eligible, with one mandatory green-flag pit stop. Then there was the purse that made Darrell Waltrip drive so hard he blew his engine the moment he crossed the finish line. The exclusivity was the point. You either earned your way in or you watched from the grandstands. Four decades later, NASCAR needs more than a moment or so to sell what’s happening at Dover.

This weekend’s All-Star Race at Dover Motor Speedway is set to see a rather layered format:

• All 36 cars start Segment 1 (75 laps)
• The top 26 finishers get inverted for Segment 2 (another 75 laps)
• The lowest combined finishing positions from both segments determine who advances
• Ten drivers are eliminated after Segment 2
• The remaining 26 race a final 200-lap sprint for the $1 million prize, with a competition caution thrown in at Lap 75 of that final segment
• No All-Star Open this year, replaced by a qualifying format that includes a pit crew challenge.
• The event is 350 laps in total, the longest All-Star Race in history.

Clearly, NASCAR seemed to be trying to make the event interesting. But at a track like Dover, the decision has landed differently among fans and drivers alike. And they are wondering whether an identity crisis can be fixed by merely an inversion?

NASCAR keeps chasing the magic again

We have to acknowledge that NASCAR’s urge to experiment is understandable, and the sport deserves credit for trying. Over the last five years alone, NASCAR has attempted everything from the Clash inside the Los Angeles Colosseum to dirt racing at Bristol and street races in Chicago. Some landed beautifully; others evaporated almost instantly. But maybe, at times, one needs to stop and ask: how much is too much?

NASCAR might have just turned The All-Star Race into a big laboratory, as they keep changing venues — Texas, Bristol, North Wilkesboro, and now Dover — every time a previous location stops feeling special enough.

Dover is the sixth different host in the event’s 41-year history, and notably the first time since 1968 that the Monster Mile will not host a points-paying race. The decision was enough to rattle the garage. Even Dale Earnhardt Jr. admitted he was surprised by the move. And Alex Bowman flatly said, “I hate Dover losing a points race.”

While Denny Hamlin, never one to leave a thought unspoken, said, “The problem is the venue. I am, of course, very against Dover losing a points race, but then you ended up having this racetrack because we were so gung-ho on giving them what they want. Nobody would pick Dover for an All-Star race.”

He went further on his Actions Detrimental podcast when the full format was revealed, calling it NASCAR’s first “swing and miss” of 2026: “We gotta make things harder, not easier. Why in the hell are 36 cars going to start the All-Star Race?”

Then, there is the structural flaw, which the inversion gimmick compounds. The top 26 from Segment 1 restart dead last through 26th in Segment 2, meaning the winner of the opening stage suddenly finds themselves buried in traffic. In theory, it sounds chaotic enough to generate action. In reality, Dover may be the worst possible track to test it.

The Monster Mile is all about rhythm — tire conservation, long runs, track position, and the kind of sustained pace that punishes anyone caught in dirty air. And passing is genuinely difficult here in the Next Gen era; concrete surfaces amplify aerodynamic disturbance, and once a fast car gets buried in traffic, clawing back through a big pack of cars in 75 laps is going to be extremely challenging.

That is exactly why the inversion creates an incentive. If the fastest teams know that winning Segment 1 means restarting dead last in Segment 2, and that Dover’s aero characteristics make that a near-impossible hole to dig out of, why would they even try to win?

Hamlin, who has thought about this more carefully than most, put the venue trap plainly: “Listen, Dover is not gonna be compelling if it’s a short run, so they had to put it in long runs, like, that’s the only way the track races kind of good. So they were just in a box by the venue. And so I don’t think that there was any format that they really could formulate to make it this all-star type thing.”

Well, that case can be made: no format tweak could have saved the All-Star race at Dover. After all, the best All-Star moments were never engineered through formats. They happened organically.

Earnhardt’s “Pass in the Grass” over Bill Elliott in 1987, Jeff Gordon dominating all three segments in the legendary “T-Rex” Jurassic Park car in 1997, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. winning as a rookie under the lights at Charlotte in 2000 while his father stood next to him in the victory lane. Even the 1989 edition created an enduring moment not through its format but through Rusty Wallace bumping Darrell Waltrip out of the lead in the final laps — prompting Waltrip’s legendary line, “I hope he chokes on the $200,000.”

The point being that everyone remembers the emotion.

North Wilkesboro accidentally exposed what fans actually want

There is a big lesson NASCAR may have missed after its three-year All-Star run at North Wilkesboro. The TV numbers were not flattering, as viewership dropped from 2.573 million in 2024 to just 1.965 million in 2025 – the lowest All-Star figure since at least 2008.

But the atmosphere at the track itself was electric. Fans packed the grandstands, drivers genuinely embraced the old-school circuit, and the place felt alive in a way modern NASCAR rarely delivers. The 2025 race even produced a record 18 lead changes and a bumper-to-bumper battle between Christopher Bell and Joey Logano in the closing laps. The finish needs to sell the format, then, perhaps?

Because North Wilkesboro gave the All-Star Race something it had been desperately lacking: identity. It felt exclusive, historic, and slightly volatile, where tempers could explode and legends could be reborn. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. punched Kyle Busch after the 2024 race, and that happened because the atmosphere made everything feel higher-stakes. 

Dover, by contrast, feels like NASCAR outsmarting itself again. Bubba Wallace, who called Dover one of his favorite tracks to drive, still couldn’t hide his mixed feelings about the event itself.

“I woke up on Monday morning and was like, ‘where are we racing at on Sunday’ and was like ‘oh yeah, Dover, All Star,’ and it doesn’t feel like All Star week so that sucks,” Wallace said. “It just doesn’t feel like All-Star weekend. It just feels like another race weekend.”

So what should NASCAR actually do?

The answers aren’t complicated, even if executing them requires nerve:

Shrink the field, firstly. The original 1985 race had 12 cars, and the magic number should never be 36. When the entire garage qualifies, it stops being an All-Star event and starts being a glorified exhibition. The elimination format this year attempts to address this, but beginning with all 36 cars dilutes the opening segments before a single lap is run. True exclusivity means not everyone gets a participation invite. 

Then, let the racing create chaos, not the rulebook, and this simple thing would do wonders. Instead of inversions, why not mandatory green-flag pit windows with zero cautions? Why not soft-compound tires engineered for natural fall-off, creating genuine comers-and-goers without artificial reshuffling?

And as far as innovating goes, think back to the 1992 All-Star Race at Charlotte, the first superspeedway race ever run under lights, stick to innovations like that. 

Return the event to a venue that makes it feel different. North Wilkesboro returns to the schedule this season as a points-paying race on July 19, which is genuinely the right call for that track. But NASCAR now needs to find its next All-Star home. Dover is a great track for points races, but it cannot be an All-Star venue in any emotional sense. Charlotte gave the event 34 years of identity, and the focus has to be on bringing that energy back. 

That said, Hamlin, who has won this event himself, may have asked the most uncomfortable question of all when the venue discussion began: “Why are we so hung up on we need an All-Star race? Every league is struggling with their All-Star event currently. Ours is no exception to that.”

He’s right that every sport is fighting the same battle. The NBA, MLB, and NHL All-Star weekends are all shadows of what they once were. But NASCAR’s version had something those other sports never did: real stakes, real contact, real consequences. 

Because if the drivers can’t feel the electricity before the engines fire, the fans probably won’t either. And no format, no matter how boldly designed, can substitute for an identity this race spent four decades building and a few restless years slowly giving away.