Sorry haters…but the Playoff system isn’t changing in 2025!
NASCAR has stated that there will be no changes to the playoff format for 2025, but they will look at making some changes for next season.
NASCAR executive vice president, chief racing development officer John Probst spoke on making any changes saying, “I don’t think we want to get in the habit of making small little tweaks every season to the playoffs, Where we landed was for 2025 not making any changes to the playoffs. Throughout the course of this year, we will get a working group together with some media folks, OEMs, Goodyear, drivers. … We probably talked to most of the folks one-on-one about, where are we at? What are we thinking? Basically, we look at that as a workstream for a group of our stakeholders this year, to look at it holistically.”
Several questions arose during the 2024 playoff over eligibility after a number of waivers were issued and one top scoring driver even missed a race due to a conflict after some bad weather.
Probst added, “the playoffs were meant to create those moments, which I feel like they did. And on the other hand, there’s the fan feedback — which we hear loud and clear — on this particular driver should have been here, or that particular driver won this many races, so he should have been automatically in and all of that.”
Probst noted that there are three schools of thought – those that hate the playoff format, those who love it, and those who are on the fence but added, “we just didn’t get to a point where we felt like we have to do it. But we hear the fans loud and clear and are looking at it actively.”
To date, there have been no specific suggestions for any changes. NASCAR will be seeking opinions from drivers, teams, manufacturers, media and officials.
NASCAR president Steve Phelps noted, “we are always looking if there are opportunities for us to tweak something.”
NASCAR chief operations officer added, “we’re not going to go away from playoffs. We’ll absolutely look at what form the playoffs take in the offseason. You always learn. … But playoffs in and of itself, as Steve said, you cannot argue with the quality of racing that the playoffs have delivered. You can talk about the format if we do some different things, but absolutely we’re going to stick with it.”