Today marks the very first race of the newest NASCAR points system.

There’s been a lot of offseason coverage on the return of the Chase. That is an important element to it, but the actual point distribution and the history of it are also worthy of discussion.

Points took a backseat in the last 12 seasons. But with no more “win-and-in” or one-race championship, points are now once again the most important element to determining the championship.

Race winners will now recieve 55 points. Second place will receive 35 points, with one point-increments from there down the field. 36th will receive 1 point, with 37th-40th also receiving 1 point. Stages are worth 10 points for winning, 9 for second, and so on. Finally, the fastest lap awards 1 bonus point for whoever is eligible for it.

This means that 76 is now the maximum amount of points one can gain in a single race. 1 point is the minimum.

Had this system been in place last season (which is really easy to calculate as the only change to the points distribution was 15 more points to the winner), William Byron would have ended race 26 as the points leader with 894 points. A max win makes up 8.5% of that number.

Now, just to compare, let’s look at the old Bob Latford system. That system was first introduced in 1975 and ran unchanged until the introduction of the Chase in 2004. Even then, the points distribution stayed about the same in the following years until 2011, when NASCAR first introduced the 1-point increment standard they use today.

The maximum amount of points that one could score in the Latford system was 185, by winning the race and leading the most laps.

After 26 races in 2003, Matt Kenseth had 3,864 points. This is just 4.8% of what a max win paid.

Why are the percentages this lopsided? One obvious aspect, of course, is that it pays more to win in the 2026 system than in the Latford system, relatively.

But even then, if we take the 2025 standings as they were without that 15-point bonus, a max win (61 points) is still 7.1% of the 864 amount Byron had.

The reason for that disparity is the conditions in which both systems were developed.

When Latford scribbled down the 1975 point system on a Steak n Shake napkin, NASCAR had two distinct goals. One was to create a point system that heavily penalized drivers for missing a race.

In 1974, an average of 35.7 cars started each of the 30 races that season, or 36 cars rounded up. Showing up and finishing 37th the next year would grant you 52 points, or 28.1% of what a max win paid.

When Winston came into NASCAR in the early 1970s, the schedule was cut down in part to try and create more value for each race on it. This only worked to a degree, as even a few years later, there were still a number of teams and drivers who did not run every race to save money.

The 1974 point system was an object disaster, a situation where NASCAR was very lucky that Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough were the best drivers of the year and happened to finish 1-2 in the Daytona 500, almost guaranteeing them 1-2 in the championship at the end of the year.

But third was David Pearson, who skipped 11 of the 30 races. Bobby Allison missed three races but still finished fourth in the standings. Buddy Baker was seventh in spite of also skipping 11 races.

Winston was pouring a lot of money into the end-of-season points fund. These three being able to be as high as they were lessened the value of so many of the low purse events on the schedule. Only six drivers bothered to show up for all 30 races. NASCAR couldn’t promote or feature the races as well as they should have in part because of all of that uncertainty.

So the Latford system awarded, above anything, showing up to every single race. And the proof was in the pudding. In 1976, the second year of the Latford system, 14 drivers started every race. Only Pearson (who finished seventh with 10 wins in 22 starts) and Dick Brooks (who skipped two races) didn’t run the full season yet also finished top 15 in points.

The other goal of the Latford system was to try and keep more drivers in the championship hunt while stopping drivers from running away with the championship by winning a bunch of races. In 1974, four drivers won 29 of the 30 races, with both Petty and Yarborough winning 10 apiece. The disparity in equipment was still very large in that era.

This is why the Latford system led to so many great points battles over the years, because winning a bunch of races didn’t give as much of an edge as consistency did.

Now, let’s look at the 1-point system. When it was first developed for the 2011 season, 48 was the max race amount and 1 was the minimum. This means starting a race would only net 2% of the amount of points a max race win pays.

Why did NASCAR not care about people skipping races anymore? By 2010, 33 drivers attempted every race, with the entire top 25 (points fund paying positions) all having started 36 races. The worry that drivers or teams would simply skip the low purse races and still get a piece of the points fund didn’t exist anymore.

The 2026 format is even more of an outline of how much NASCAR doesn’t care about that anymore. The min-max percentage is now 1.3%. NASCAR now has a guarantee of 36 teams showing up every week, with drivers now having to submit waivers if they dare to miss a race and want to maintain Chase eligibility.

Jimmie Johnson finished third in the Daytona 500 last year and was tied in points with Cody Ware after seven races, in spite of Ware having started the six others after Daytona and Johnson only starting Daytona.

And the other goal of the Latford system, to stop drivers from running away with the championship? The equipment disparity creating that problem in the first place does not exist anymore. The Next Gen or new car, or whatever we’re calling it now, is a spec car that stops teams from being able to be dramatically faster than the rest of the field.

In 2025, eight drivers won multiple races. In the first year of the Next Gen in 2022, 18 drivers won races. No driver has won more than six races in a season since that year. The point system doesn’t need to create parity anymore because the car already provides parity.

One aspect of the racing this year that should be unique is just how less of an incentive there will be to race hard for any position on track besides the race win. A 20 point swing is massive and makes going for a race win from second (which awards a total of only 35 points) a no-brainer.

But let’s look at one of the other positions on track. Let’s pretend you are in eighth place, and you want to pass seventh for position. But there’s a chance while passing them that you’ll wreck out of the race and finish in 36th.

Under the Latford system, you would be at a net 142 points, risking it all to move up to 146 points (a point increase of 2.8%), with a chance of wrecking and finishing with 55 points (a point decrease of 61.3%).

Under the 2026 system, you would be at a net 29 points, risking it all to move up to 30 points (a point increase of 3.4%), with a chance of wrecking and finishing with 1 point (a point decrease of 96.6%).

While there is slightly more benefit to trying to pass seventh under the 2026 system, the stiff penalty for not finishing is going to stop a lot of the dumb moves we’ve seen in recent years, where drivers would risk it for nothing positions because they just need to win a race somewhere for it not to matter.

Will the 2026 system decide the rightful champion? It’s hard to say that any system is a “perfect system.” Even the beloved Latford system has various problems that many of its supporters do not want to address.

Perhaps NASCAR could add more point gaps in the top 5 and top 10 to address the drastic DNF penalty by at least giving more incentive to make those moves. That’s something the Latford system does. But it has also been a huge detriment to the product for drivers to just run into each other nowhere near the lead.

Regardless of my musings, it’s absolutely an improvement over what we’ve had. And it’s clear to tell with how few detractors there have been on the subject online in the last month.