Five races ago, Kyle Larson was 55 points behind Denny Hamlin. Five races later, he leads him by 40.
That's a 95-point reversal, built piece by piece over five races.
If one number captures the first half of The 2026 Chase presented by Mobil 1 as the heralded postseason format makes its refreshed return this season, it might be that.
The defending champion Larson entered as a wayward No. 7 seed and has since flipped the entire season on its head, finishing fifth, first, second, first and second so far. He's turned what appeared to be a significant early deficit both in points and aura into the largest championship lead of The Chase -- and growing.
Larson's run has been nothing short of dominant. It has also been informative.
Five races are enough to reveal trends, separate hot streaks from noise and expose which teams have elevated their game when the points matter most. They are also enough to remind us just how much can still change with five races left.
Let's dig in, with stats courtesy of Racing Insights.
Larson didn't just get hot — he changed the entire 2026 narrative
The No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet driver's 2.2 average finish through Darlington Raceway, World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway, Bristol Motor Speedway, Kansas Speedway and Las Vegas Motor Speedway is the best through the first five races of The Chase since the format debuted in 2004, and his 273 points over that stretch are the most anyone has scored in a five-race span this year.
The contrast with his regular season is even more striking.
Larson averaged just 27.85 points per race before The Chase, with questions swirling about whether the team had it this year or was perhaps experiencing a championship hangover. He's since put those questions very much to rest, averaging 54.6 through the first half here -- nearly double the production rate.
Racing Insights' championship model has followed suit. Larson entered The Chase with an 11.9% title probability, behind Hamlin at 40.5% and even Ty Gibbs at 12.0%. After Las Vegas, Larson is up to 46.3%, while Hamlin sits at 32.5% and Christopher Bell is next at 8.6%.
Nobody else is above 3.4%.
That is about as close to seizing control in five races as one can get.
It is not the same thing, however, as finishing the job.
MORE: Analysis: Larson's resilience puts No. 5 team in championship control
Chaos hasn't produced parity, but the opposite
The first half of The Chase has been volatile almost everywhere except Larson's results column. Ten of the 16 Chase drivers had a documented issue at Darlington right from the jump. Fourteen did in a memorably messy afternoon at St. Louis. Eight encountered trouble at Bristol, six at Kansas and nine at Las Vegas.
That is 47 of 80 possible Chase-driver race appearances -- nearly 59% -- involving an incident, mechanical problem, pit-road mistake or other significant adversity. And somehow, while all that has been happening, the championship has become more top-heavy.
At the reset, five drivers were more than a maximum race's worth of points behind the leader. That figure grew to seven after Darlington, eight after St. Louis, nine after Bristol, 12 after Kansas, and stayed at 12 after Las Vegas. The No. 1 seed Hamlin is already 40 points back. Bell is 55 behind, Joey Logano 71. From Ryan Blaney in fifth on down, every driver trails Larson by more than the maximum 76 points available in a single race.
So the lesson isn't that the contenders are avoiding trouble -- nobody is. The separation has come from what happens after the trouble arrives.
Larson fell a lap down at Las Vegas after an extended green-flag stop for major adjustments and still finished second. Tyler Reddick changed a battery and finished third. Bubba Wallace overcame a pit-road penalty and finished eighth. It's just that Larson and Co. are really the only ones who have rebounded from everything thrown at them ... so far.
That does not mean that will continue to be the case (now, having said that, the No. 5 team
does appear to be as locked in as ever at the moment, so good luck).
But clearly, in a cumulative Chase, damage limitation is becoming a championship skill in its own right.
Some drivers have become different versions of themselves
Larson's jump is the loudest, but it is hardly the only one.
Logano has gone from 27.27 points per race during the regular season to 42.4 in The Chase. Bell has climbed from 29.15 to 42.6. Austin Cindric has improved from 24.27 to 37.0, while Wallace and Chase Briscoe have increased their scoring rates, too.
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Cindric might be the most surprising name in that group, and his 8.0 average finish through five Chase races trails only Larson. His runner-up finish at Kansas, followed by a fourth at Las Vegas, marked the first consecutive top-five finishes of his Cup career.
Bell has taken a much stranger route to strong production. He has already absorbed finishes of 19th and 23rd -- and still ranks second only to Larson in total Chase points.
Hamlin offers the inverse, remaining second in the championship while actually scoring 3.9
fewer points per race than he did during the regular season.
Then there's William Byron, whose Chase began with a 37th-place finish at Darlington, to which he answered with four consecutive top 10s, yet remains 12th and 160 points back despite being the only driver to finish inside the top 10 in all seven 1.5-mile races this season.
That may be the cruelest lesson of the first five races: one disastrous afternoon can be remarkably difficult to erase.
Now the schedule changes the exam
The first five races have told us plenty, and the next five are almost purpose-built to challenge our assumptions.
Charlotte Motor Speedway, Phoenix Raceway, Talladega Superspeedway, Martinsville Speedway and Homestead-Miami Speedway make up the closing stretch, offering nothing but classic NASCAR racing left: a 1.5-mile oval, a 1-mile flat track, a superspeedway, a half-mile paperclip and another 1.5-mile oval to (most likely) settle the championship.
And while Larson owned the first half of this thing, the remaining-track history tilts toward several of the drivers chasing him.
Hamlin has 14 career wins across the five remaining tracks, including nine at the final two. Logano has 10 combined victories at those venues, Blaney eight and Chase Elliott, who still feels a little
too quiet, six. Larson, Bell and Byron each have five.
MORE: Cup Series schedule
Sunday's race at Charlotte (3 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, PRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) immediately raises some unknowns. The oval returns to The Chase for the first time since 2017, and 10 different drivers have won the last 10 Cup races there. Sunday will also mark the first scheduled
400-mile Cup race at Charlotte since 1965.
Then comes the mercurial Talladega, followed immediately by Martinsville, where Hamlin's six victories are the most any Chase driver owns at any remaining track.
And if the championship is still up for grabs when everyone arrives at Homestead, it will end back on a 1.5-mile track, where Hamlin again owns a field-best 4.57 average finish at those venues this season and Larson, Byron, Briscoe and others have built compelling statistical cases of their own.
Five races ago, Larson was chasing Hamlin; now everybody's looking up at Larson. A month and change was enough to turn a 55-point deficit and a whole lot of preconceived notions into a 40-point lead and a whole lot of uncertainty.
Five more are enough to turn all of the above on its head, too.