WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Just three races remain in the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series regular season, and it’s anyone’s guess as to who could take home the regular season championship.
By winning the regular season title, the driver will not only receive a trophy (which could serve as a consolation prize if they don’t win the overall championship) and 15 playoff points in addition to the playoff points they’ve earned throughout the year.
With a maximum of 183 possible points left to gain throughout the final three races, the top nine drivers in points are still mathematically eligible for the regular season crown. But realistically, it’ll come down to four drivers — the ‘Regular Season Championship 4,’ if you will.
First, there’s the current points leader, William Byron, who enters Sunday’s (Aug. 10) race at Watkins Glen International as the leader by 18 points. For the No. 24 team, it’s hard not to think about points when wins don’t come easily, but poor results do.
“It’s on the front of our mind for sure during the week,” Byron said. “I’m sure every driver’s guilty of looking at the points right after the race. As soon as we get those after the event, we just look at them and be like, ‘okay, here’s where we’re at and here’s how many points we got this weekend.’ It’s more before and after the weekend.
”I would say there’s very little decision-making during the race that changes because of the points. I think you just try to run the best race that you can, and typically that’s how you get the most points.”
Behind Byron is Chase Elliott, who, despite having just one win on the season, has shown incredible consistency. For the first time since his missing seven combined races in 2023 due to suspension and injury, the No. 9 team looks like a championship-caliber team.
Kyle Larson sits third in points, having cooled off since scoring win No. 3 on the year back at Kansas Speedway three months ago. Since then, the No. 5 team has suffered four finishes of 28th or worse, and several other races slipped out of their grasp.
”[We need] some good finishes, good stage points these next few weeks will be really important,” Larson said. “We’re definitely not out of it. I think you’ve seen big swings happen in the points for Next Gen races, with how crazy the races get.”
Larson only trails Byron by 45 points and just needs one big break to go his way to fully reassert himself back in the fight.
Finally, 51 points behind Byron is Denny Hamlin. Like Larson, Hamlin also just needs one big break go his way to get back in it, though his road to a regular season title was not aided by the fact he missed Autodromos Hermanos Rodriguez while his fiancée gave birth to their son.
”[Watkins Glen]’s a little bit different,” Hamlin said on points racing on Sunday vs. racing for the win. “We’re probably chasing points more than chasing a win — I don’t know that we have winning speed.”
Hamlin noted that he hasn’t been the best road course racer as of late.
”If we can exclude the road courses, I believe I’m [the best active NASCAR driver],” Hamlin said.
If you haven’t noticed by now, the top three are all Hendrick Motorsports drivers, which makes the battle up top interesting with regard to how the Byron, Elliott and Larson race each other in the final three weeks.
“We’ve all raced for wins and raced against each other in the playoffs and championships, so it doesn’t change for the regular season,” Byron said. “It’s the same. We all race each other well and, if anything, you just get a little bit more crafty.”
”I don’t think anything changes for us,” Elliott added. “We’ll just continue to go and do our own thing. Generally speaking, I feel like the communication of things that go on behind closed doors are very open and honest. … I don’t think there’s a need for us to change our procedure or how we go about things throughout the week.”
The final three races of the season consist of Sunday’s race at Watkins Glen, a trip to Richmond Raceway on Aug. 16, and then the crapshoot that is the summer race at Daytona International Speedway on Aug. 23.
With a wild assortment of races left to decide the regular season champion, the biggest thing drivers are looking to capitalize on are the tracks they’re strongest at.
“Watkins Glen has been a track we were good at two years before last year,” Larson said. “Richmond’s kind of a hit or miss track for us, and then Daytona, anything can happen.”
”Richmond’s just so technical in how you approach it,” said Hamlin about his home track. “You can’t miss the bottom by more than a foot [or] you’ll lose a lot of time. It’s a hard track. It’s more technical than it’s ever been.
”[I’d] love to get another win [there]. It’d be very timely and certainly a good boost going into the playoffs.”
Most agreed, however, with Larson’s sentiment that Daytona is the one track that they need to just finish in order to stay in the hunt.
“You’re hopeful that you get to a point there where you kind of know where you stand before you get to Daytona,” Byron said. “Because you can have a 40-point swing at Daytona alone. We saw that at Atlanta [Motor Speedway] — we crashed out in the first stage and we had almost a 40- or 50-point swing to the guys we were around. So you just hope that by the time you get there, you can have some more certainty.”
“You could be leading with two or three [laps] to go and next thing you know, someone that doesn’t have a win comes up and surprises — like Harrison Burton did last year,” Hamlin said.
All four contenders have a tough drive ahead of them at Watkins Glen. Byron starts the best of them in 10th. Elliott is mired back in 20th, while Hamlin will start 22nd. Larson, meanwhile, had an uncharacteristically off qualifying session and posted a time good enough for 27th, which will likely become 26th due to Connor Zilisch’s withdrawal from the race.
That leaves Byron with a solid chance to open his points gap up early, depending on strategy. As far as opening up a big enough cushion to be comfortable heading to Daytona? With three completely different styles of tracks coming up, Byron’s guess is as good as ours.
”I don’t want to put a number on it, but I would just like to see how these next couple weeks go,” Byron said. “I look at it as this is kind of its own three-race round right here, so [it’s] good preparation for us.
”As unpredictable as Watkins Glen, Richmond and Daytona can be, it’s honestly not much different than the Round of 8. You’ve got Talladega [Superspeedway] in there this year, so it could be a lot like this stretch.”
Anthony Damcott joined Frontstretch in March 2022. Currently, he is an editor and co-authors Fire on Fridays (Fridays); he is also the primary Truck Series reporter/writer and serves as an at-track reporter. He has also assisted with short track content and social media, among other duties he takes/has taken on for the site. In 2025, he became an official member of the National Motorsports Press Association. A proud West Virginia Wesleyan College alum from Akron, Ohio, Anthony is now a grad student. He is a theatre actor and fight coordinator in his free time.
You can keep up with Anthony by following @AnthonyDamcott on X.