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NASCAR will line up Cup Series fields by owner points when qualifying is canceled in 2027, dropping the previous week’s finishing order from the formula, NASCAR’s John Probst said Friday.
Probst, NASCAR’s president of event management, also said the series is looking at adding pit stops to qualifying, like the All-Star Race, at a few races next season. He spoke on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
Probst: ‘There’s no math involved’
The current qualifying metric combines a car’s finish the week before with its owner points position. Probst said several rainouts early this season showed its flaws.
“Certainly I would say that a lot of the work that we did on the metric where we take, you know, your finish the week before and then add that to your owner’s position serves a good purpose for qualifying,” Probst said. “I think though that, you know, when we look at it and see how it happened this year, I think we had four of our first six or something like that get rained out for qualifying.”
“And then you really do see some of the potential unfairness and how it was going to lay out when we did the wet weather lineup that way. So what we’re going to do for 2027 is line them up by owner’s points. That’ll make it a little bit easier to explain to our fans. There’s no math involved other than you just look at the owner’s points, and that’s how we’ll line them up on Sunday.”
Pit stops in qualifying
Probst said NASCAR could also cut superspeedway qualifying to one round, and is talking with teams about qualifying with a pit stop at a handful of races.
“Not trying to break a whole lot of news, but we are looking at that All-Star style qualifying where you actually have a pit stop for maybe a very select few races next year,” Probst said. “Just to kind of mix it up, see the fans’ reaction to just adding a little bit more activity to the qualifying and, you know, kind of making it more of a team qualifying versus just a driver out there going as fast as he can, but bringing the pit crew into it.”
“So we’re still working on that with the teams, but that is something we’d like to do next year for a handful of events.”
A busy offseason
The qualifying changes are part of a long list of offseason work for NASCAR. Officials have said fixing fuel saving at superspeedways is a top priority, and Elton Sawyer said this week NASCAR wants to make penalty calls like the Martinsville brake-checks during races, as Pit This Time reported.
The 2027 season will also bring Dodge back to the Cup Series.
Cup qualifying for Sunday’s finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway is Saturday at 2:30 p.m. ET on truTV. The race is Sunday at 3 p.m. ET on NBC.
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