Analysis: Why three straight intermediates could define championship battle

Neil Paine

5 mins ago

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The unique tracks of NASCAR are a big part of the sport’s appeal — for the most part, it’s never quite the same experience from week to week, with different sites testing different skills and putting on a different spectacle for fans. (Emphasis on the “spectacle” last week at Bristol, with the pit lane dust-up between Ryan Blaney and Carson Hocevar.) But as much as any other track type, the simple mile-and-a-half oval represents NASCAR’s most fundamental test of talent and execution. And in 2026’s Chase presented by Mobil 1, the Cup Series championship may very well ride on a trio of them coming up over the next three weeks: Kansas (Sun. 3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), Las Vegas and Charlotte. Whichever contender does best during that stretch — or even just survives it with their title hopes still intact — could take control of The Chase with just four events remaining. RELATED: Kansas weekend schedule | Cup Series standings In particular, let’s zero in on the 10 drivers sitting within 100 points of the current Chase lead: leader Kyle Larson plus Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano, Christopher Bell, Ty Gibbs, Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Carson Hocevar, Chase Briscoe and Bubba Wallace. The truth is that it will be difficult — if not completely impossible — for anyone outside of that group to hunt down the front-runners for the title from here, with seven races remaining. Put another way, our 2026 champ will almost certainly come from that core group of 10 names. (With apologies to Austin Cindric, Chase Elliott, William Byron, Ryan Preece, Chris Buescher and Daniel Suárez.) And as we’ve written a few times before, the fact that this pivotal three-race section of The Chase schedule involves three consecutive 1.5-mile ovals favors some contenders significantly more than others. Denny Hamlin, for instance, is still the statistical favorite to win his first career championship despite ceding the points lead — which was his every week of the season since Sonoma on June 28 — until Larson took over at Bristol. For one thing, his loss of the lead sounds more dramatic than it actually is: Larson leads Hamlin by just a single point. But also, Hamlin is clearly the king of the intermediates this season. If we look at a broad group of that type of track — Kansas, Vegas, Texas, Charlotte, Chicagoland, Michigan, Nashville and Darlington — over the course of nine total races this season, Hamlin has the most wins (three), the best average finish (4.9) by far and the best average Driver Rating (115.2) as well. Reddick (with two wins and a 112.7 rating) is one of the few contenders whose resume on those tracks is somewhat comparable this year, but the rest of the title-hopefuls are bunched in a tier well behind Hamlin.

(That includes Larson, who nearly has a triple-digit rating but also has posted an uncharacteristically ordinary 16.2 average finish on these tracks.) At the other end of the spectrum is Logano, who has been quite mediocre on the intermediates this season. Yes, Logano is coming off a thrilling win at Bristol — even if it was somewhat overshadowed by the post-race fireworks — and he is one of the most clutch drivers of the modern era, so you can never count him out from a championship performance. But he is certainly not going into a favorable sequence on the schedule, if things hold to recent form. Zooming in even further on the core mile-and-a-half tracks the series has raced at in 2026 thus far, Hamlin has been even more dominant, with an average finish of 2.6 and an average Driver Rating of 128.2:

The rest of the contenders are more of a mixed bag, with Reddick looking next-best in general, followed by Bell, Gibbs, Briscoe and Wallace. (Larson, again somewhat uncharacteristically, ranks eighth out of the group in average finish and fifth in rating.) Now, that’s just a five-race sample, so it’s important not to read too much into things there, but it illustrates why Hamlin might have the edge as we speed into this critical segment of The Chase. The good news for the rest of the title hopefuls, though, is that Hamlin comes back toward the pack a bit if we expand our view to earlier seasons. For instance, look at the same core tracks from above last year. Over the last two seasons, Hamlin ranks third in average finish (11.3) — trailing both Bell (11.0) and Briscoe (11.0) — and second in rating (108.2), in a de facto dead heat with Larson (109.0). Logano also looks a bit better by finishing quality, if not pure rating, with Hocevar emerging as the consensus weakest contender on the 1.5-mile tracks. And if we look at just Kansas, Vegas and Charlotte in the Next Gen Car era (since 2022), Larson finally lives up to his own long-held reputation on the intermediates, leading the group in both average finish (9.2) and Driver Rating (109.3) to edge out Hamlin (9.8 and 107.5, respectively) in both categories. Bell and Reddick are the consensus next-best performers, with Logano coming up next on average finish and Blaney following on Driver Rating. Here’s a summary of all four snapshots in a single chart, to get a good visual sense of whom to watch over these next three races:

For Hamlin, the task is obvious: Keep doing what you’ve been doing. The expectation is that he should lead in points again coming out of these races, or else he will be running out of prime chances to bolster his championship hopes. For Larson, there’s a similar story with the twist that he must clean up his finishes — we’re not used to seeing the Hendrick No. 5 finish outside the top 16 on average at these types of ovals, even if his averages are being dragged down by a pair of 34th-place runs at Texas and Chicago. Out of the rest, Bell might be in the best position to come away stronger: He only trails Larson by 17 points in the standings, and he has driven very well (104.5 rating) at mile-and-a-half tracks this season. A similar story could be told for Gibbs, but he is both further back in the points (42) and hasn’t driven as well on 1.5-milers (95.3 rating). And perhaps the big wild-cards are Logano — who’s just 16 points back but has struggled on tracks like these in 2026 — and Reddick — who is shockingly buried in 7th place (61 points back) but has a tremendous performance record (108.4 rating) on these kinds of tracks. It’s make-or-break time for both drivers — but then again, it’s make-or-break for everybody right now. And by the time we emerge from Charlotte, the number of plausible champs may be considerably smaller as everyone looks ahead to the final four races of The Chase, with the mile-and-a-half gauntlet having done its job of sorting the true contenders from the pretenders.