Did You Notice?: NASCAR Stage Points Need To Exit, Stage Right

Did You Notice? … Christopher Bell has come out of the box swinging in 2025. He’s won three of the first four NASCAR Cup Series races, easily the most dominant stretch since Kyle Larson’s title run in 2021.

But if the season ended today, Bell wouldn’t be the regular-season champion. Instead, Daytona 500 winner William Byron would take home top honors because of stage points.

Let that sink in a minute. Bell has won 75% of all Cup races held this year, a winning percentage unheard of in this sport, yet he still falls short of the points lead by 13.

Say what?

It’s clear Bell’s quick start has exposed a flaw in a points system NASCAR last retooled in 2017. Back then, the concern was drivers weren’t giving 110% over a full race distance, sandbagging in order to save their car for the finish. Officials had been responding to that by throwing what appeared to be phantom debris cautions whenever the field got too strung out, seemingly manipulating the race in a way that infuriated fans and race teams alike. A postseason system where a win in February basically left you clinching a spot with little championship incentive until September didn’t help.

So NASCAR came up with stage points as a way to cut out some subjective officiating while encouraging more aggressiveness early on in these events. Splitting the race into three parts, the system has given drivers an opportunity to earn up to 20 extra points per race. Winning a stage is 10 points and also comes with an extra playoff bonus point you can utilize all the way through the Round of 8.

Stage points have come with some upside: they help mitigate the damage of a good day gone wrong, say, if a dominant driver gets caught in a wreck during the final stage. We saw this in the Daytona 500, Joey Logano leading a race-high 43 laps only to crash late and wind up with a 35th-place finish.

But when you add in his stage points, Logano wound up with 21 points on the weekend; only 15 drivers collected more. It took an ugly DNF and left him with the equivalent of a middling 16th-place result or thereabout.

Those stage points explain why Byron has the edge over Bell despite the latter’s sweep of the last three races. His 49 points lead the series, a 23-point advantage over Bell’s 26. Since Byron has been good over longer stretches of races, that gives him the nod despite fewer laps led, wins, top-five finishes and laps completed. It’s almost like giving your favorite NBA team the win even though it wound up losing by 20, just because it had a really good first quarter.

It’s early in the season when you can actually see how much those stage points make a difference all year. Logano doesn’t have a single top-10 finish, for example, yet he sits 10th in the standings courtesy his 46 stage points. Without them? He’d be nowhere close to playoff position, slipping behind everyone from Todd Gilliland to Carson Hocevar.

Nowhere has this system failed the smell test more, though, than with Bell’s early season success. I decided to take a quick look at some of the other point systems out there (Formula 1, the NTT IndyCar Series, even NASCAR’s old system) and see where we’d be at with a three-win driver like Bell.

2025 CUP POINTS USING FORMULA ONE POINTS SYSTEM

• Any bonus point for leading fastest lap excluded

2025 CUP POINTS USING INDYCAR POINTS SYSTEM

• Bonus point(s) for laps led, pole sitter and most laps led excluded

2025 CUP POINTS USING OLD SYSTEM (1975-2010)

• Bonus point(s) for laps led, pole sitter and most laps led excluded

2025 CUP POINTS – CURRENT SYSTEM, NO STAGE POINTS

• Points earned for Daytona Duels still included

As you can see, virtually any other way points could be applied leaves Bell as the leader, often by a commanding amount. That feels like that’s how it should be four races into the year, right? That the guy who’s won three out of four times should be your points leader?

Play this out over a full season and it’s easy to see how stage points could keep an otherwise deserving driver from missing the playoffs. It’s also a factor inside the playoffs, where advancing into the next round often comes down to a strategy point or two collected within one of the first two stages. Increasingly, it’s a subjective metric that seems unfair when the goal of a 400-mile race is to be at your best at the end of 400 miles, right? How would old-school Hall of Famers like David Pearson or Terry Labonte, who often saved their equipment early, do under a system that would fail to reward that?

There’s plenty of ways for NASCAR to still encourage early driver aggression and strategy. It could keep the races broken into stages, for example, and give a playoff point to the stage winner only. It can bring back bonus points for leading laps, something that encouraged different pit strategies in the old Latford system (1975-2010). It could give one mulligan per year, allowing a driver to throw out their worst finish so there’s less of a penalty for giving 110% trying to win the race.

What it doesn’t seem like NASCAR should be doing anymore is giving these bonuses one or two stages into the race in a way where a driver can score more points at the end of the race than the driver in victory lane. Only once during Bell’s three-race win streak has he scored more points in the race than everyone else competing.

I’ll let you read that again. The race winner lost ground in points to other people based on NASCAR’s current stage points system.

Stage points won’t be changed in 2025. But if the sport is strongly reconsidering the way it does its playoff system in 2026, the way these points are awarded should be on the chopping block, too.

Did You Notice? … Quick hits before taking off …

• Something else that doesn’t pass the smell test: four races into 2024, Ty Gibbs was considered a potential Cup title contender. This year? No top-10 finishes and already 47 points below the playoff cut line. It’s clear offseason personnel changes at Joe Gibbs Racing designed to help Gibbs haven’t exactly done so thus far.
• Justin Allgaier at least has his NASCAR Xfinity Series championship. But he’ll go down in history as a driver who could have maybe won double his current career win total if luck, circumstances and some mistakes while holding the lead tilted back his way.

Follow Tom Bowles at @NASCARBowles

Tom Bowles

Majority Owner and Editor in Chief at Frontstretch

The author of Did You Notice? (Wednesdays) Tom spends his time overseeing Frontstretch’s 40+ staff members as its majority owner and Editor-in-Chief. Based outside Philadelphia, Bowles is a two-time Emmy winner in NASCAR television and has worked in racing production with FOX, TNT, and ESPN while appearing on-air for SIRIUS XM Radio and FOX Sports 1's former show, the Crowd Goes Wild. He most recently consulted with SRX Racing, helping manage cutting-edge technology and graphics that appeared on their CBS broadcasts during 2021 and 2022.

You can find Tom’s writing here, at CBSSports.com and Athlonsports.com, where he’s been an editorial consultant for the annual racing magazine for 15 years.