by C Reber III, November 20, 2025
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” It’s an adage we’ve all heard, but in today’s NASCAR Cup Series, it’s something I don’t feel we focus upon enough. Over the years, NASCAR has crafted new ideas to attempt to boost the sport with TV, sponsors, and the not-yet-fan. Ideas designed to create constant excitement for those with short attention spans. Ideas designed to pull in sponsorship dollars for teams and TV partners alike. Playoffs, planned cautions, single lug nuts, sponsor-optimized car layouts… you name it. All in an attempt to make the product more appealing across the board.
But the hard truth? The major items that NASCAR has introduced that differentiate it from other forms of major motorsport are causing it to lose parts of its history that made it uniquely compelling. And the funniest part is this: none of the series NASCAR is trying to impress—Formula 1, IndyCar, even its own lower series—have borrowed these ideas back. There’s no imitation. There’s no flattery. If these changes were really hits, there’s no doubt that F1 and Indycar would have implemented them several years ago.
The great news: we can fix it. Outlined in this article are four major gripes with NASCAR “innovation” that I have and the ways to fix them.
Major Gripe #1: End the Playoffs — Championships Should Be 36 Races, Not One
Let’s begin with the most obvious one: the playoffs. They’ve got to go.
(side note: the inspiration to finally craft this page – and, in reality, this entire blog – was inspired by a Brock Beard video released on Youtube. The passion with which he spoke comes across beautifully in this cry for NASCAR to come to its senses about the playoffs and I could agree more. I highly recommend checking it out)
NASCAR used to have a beautifully simple concept that all racing series still maintain: race all year, score points all year, and the best driver over 36 races is the champion. No gimmicks, no reseeding, no “win and you’re in,” no drivers who scored one lucky win getting shoved to the top of a TV graphic.
If I had my way, NASCAR would adopt a points system similar to Formula 1’s—a large amount of points for a win, heavily scaled down from there. I even like the thought of only awarding points to finishers in the top 30. A win should matter because it’s a win and you should be rewarded handsomely for it. But, that doesn’t mean a second-place run isn’t still an amazing feat, whereas today, it partially feels like a failure because it didn’t lock yourself into an artificial postseason. I used to tune in every Sunday not to see who was going to become playoff-eligible, but to find out who was going to get their name etched into the record books as a person who won at Bristol. To find out who was going to tame Darlington. The type of excitement that comes with tuning in to see if someone was going to finally beat Darrell Waltrip and his 11 wins. Those races were historic on their own, not just stepping stones to season finale.
The playoff system distorts reality. A road course ringer with an 18.9 average finish can show up above a season-long titan with 15 top 5s entering the playoffs. No doubt that I still marvel at the road course ringer, yet when it comes to determining who has been the best at ALL tracks throughout the year, the playoff points and playoff seedings can be very misleading.
Bottom line is that all 36 races need to matter equally. If you structure the points to reward wins substantially more than most positions, you will always have a meaningful champion and you’ll limit the number of drivers simply out there going for “good points days.”
Major Gripe #2: End Stage Breaks — Bring Back Real Strategy
Stage breaks are easily one of the biggest self-inflicted wounds in NASCAR’s modern era.
NASCAR took one of the greatest sources of racing drama–the strategy–and effectively erased 75% of it by telling crew chiefs exactly when the caution flags will wave. It’s like handing them a cheat sheet with the answers already filled in.
The result? Every race feels like the same script. The final stage is often too short for true fuel strategy, and the tire strategy is typically limited to a question of 2 tires or 4, eliminating the 3 pit stops or more questions. Want to go faster on fresher tires for longer by pitting more often? Try to make that fit into a stage that’s only so many laps long. And if you do manage to have a stage long enough with a tire that falls off enough, a single poorly timed natural caution wipes out the threat of an exciting strategy finish. Suddenly we’re back to the overplayed “win the restart to win the race” model. Yes, restarts are exciting—but not when they’re the only reliable way to win.
And I LOVED when NASCAR briefly tried removing stage breaks at road courses. It was brilliant. It was organic. It felt like real racing again. But NASCAR listened to the pundits who complained that nothing changed during a ridiculously small sample and returned to the stage break (nevermind the fact that those same pundits are not generally fans of F1 or Indycar road racing where strategy is everything).
While we’re at it, let’s talk TV. NASCAR likes to pretend stage breaks help broadcasters. In 2020s the majority of TV watching systems have a DVR type functionality built it. And as someone who watches with DVR? I can tell you with complete sincerity: I skip them. I skip the pit stops. I skip the commercials. I hit play right before the green flag drops, and 9 times out of 10 my driver is basically where he was before. I haven’t missed a thing except for a block of commercials and the analysis of what one team lost 5 spots due to hung lug nut or a fallen jack.
How is that good for advertisers? Instead of commercials sprinkled in through the coverage where I might actually watch them during a “non-stop” segment, I already know what 8 minute chunks of the race and commercials that I’m never going to watch.
My solution: Keep the points, ditch the caution. Award stage points ONCE per race—around the 40% mark—but do not stop the action. Make it easy for fans before the first green: points awarded at lap 125 in New Hampshire. Points awarded at lap 80 in Talladega. No more planned yellows. No more artificial resets. Just real racing strategies playing out in real time, making each race mean so much more.
Major Gripe #3: Bring Back Five Lug Nuts — Pit Stops Should Have Variability
Now let’s talk about the single lug nut. Why did this even become a thing?
Yes, F1 and IndyCar use single lug nuts. That doesn’t mean NASCAR should. NASCAR races always benefited from the human element where pitstops are very rarely perfect, and the team that could put together the best of “not-perfect” would prevail. Surgically precise, two-second pit stops where every team is separated by only a few tenths only allows for failures to standout as opposed to creating a platform for the unsung heroes of the team to create something special. The closer the pit stops get to zero, the closer they get to being meaningless.
In that case, NASCAR could create a safer and statistically equal environment where each pitstop under caution would be untimed and each driver would resume the race in the same position they entered the pits.After that NASCAR could perform an algorithm on the running order to slightly jumble the field based upon pitcrew “speed” and bad “luck”. No one wants that.
Back in the late ’80s and ’90s, a fantastic 17-second pit stop could gain you four seconds over another team’s 21-second stop. Four seconds! Under green, that’s the difference between running 20th and running 10th. Pit crews could truly be heroes—“The 12 team just knocked out a stop two seconds faster than the field!” Now? The only pit road storyline is who screwed up.
And philosophically: what part of “stock car racing” includes a hypercar-style single center lock nut? I look at the cars in my driveway. The cars in my neighborhood. The cars in the grocery store parking lot. Not a single one of them uses this system. NASCAR prides itself on having the NextGen car at least resemble the vehicles you can buy on the lot. A single lug nut simply doesn’t fit with that aesthetic or simply make any sense.
Need more? NASCAR doesn’t use single lugs in O-Reilly, Trucks or in ARCA. They don’t even imitate themselves consistently.
Let’s just go back to five lugs and restore the drama that used to make pit stops must-watch moments.
Major Gripe #4: Fix Paint Schemes and Number Placement — Let Stars Become Icons Again
My final gripe might seem cosmetic at first, but it goes way deeper: paint schemes and number placement. NASCAR used to do this perfectly.
For decades, every Cup car had its number on the door, under the window—unmistakable, unmissable, iconic. Then NASCAR moved the numbers forward to give sponsors more space, hoping it would lure in more companies. Honestly? I don’t buy it. I cannot imagine some sponsor walking in and saying, “You know, we were this close to spending a few million dollars with your team, but without that extra foot and a half of space, we just can’t justify it.”
But the bigger issue isn’t the number move—it’s the endless churn of paint schemes created a desire to satisfy each and every sponsor equally.
One of my all-time favorite things to do each offseason was check Jayski for next year’s paint schemes. I could spend hours scrolling through pictures of yet-to-be-deployed stock cars that may only look fractionally different. Remember how Tony Stewart’s Home Depot car was largely the same year to year, yet I still enjoyed spending the time trying to spot what colors were used in different amounts, what sponsors had a larger presence on the car, which sponsors were missing and so on. Those changes could tell you so much about sponsor excitement around a race team.
Not to mention if you’re like me and watch races on NASCAR Classics on Youtube — you could instantly identify the year of the race simply by the paint schemes of the cars just by the cars on track. Watching a race with a gold-numbered black #28 Texaco Havoline Ford? That’s 1990. Now, you can watch races from the past several years and see a black and blue Freightliner paint scheme (undeniably beautiful to be sure) and not know what year, driver, or even team that car was racing for.
The fact that teams and drivers switch schemes so often creates the inability for casual fans to pick their favorite driver out of a lineup. If Dale Earnhardt ran the Daytona 500 in the classic black 3, then rolled up two weeks later in a light blue 3 with a different sponsor, then a few weeks after that in a red-and-orange 3 with a third sponsor, would he have become the Dale Earnhardt? Of course not.
Consistency makes things approachable and memorable. Consistency breeds loyalty. Loyalty builds stars. Stars build the sport.
Even Formula 1—which borrowed NASCAR’s concept of permanent numbers that do not change from season to season—limits the number of drastically different schemes teams can run in a season. They understand branding. They understand identity. NASCAR absolutely needs to reclaim that.
Let’s Save NASCAR
Fixing NASCAR isn’t complicated. It just requires giving up the imitation game and going back to what made NASCAR popular at the end of the last century. Get rid of the playoffs. End planned stage breaks with cautions. Do away with the single lug nut. Bring back identifiable, consistent iconic paint schemes with prominent side numbers.
Do that, and NASCAR suddenly gets its identity back: a sport where every race matters, every pit stop matters, every car is recognizable from week to week, and every fan can form the kind of deep loyalties that made this sport explode in the first place.
And if imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then NASCAR has to ask themselves this: why hasn’t F1 copied NASCAR’s playoff format? Why hasn’t IndyCar adopted stage cautions? Why does Formula 1 have rules in place that prevent weekly paint-scheme roulette?
NASCAR has spent years flattering other series and forgetting who they are. It’s time it stopped—and went back to being the one worth imitating.