Denny Hamlin suffered one of the most heartbreaking championship defeats in recent sports history in the 2025 NASCAR Championship Race at Phoenix.
The NASCAR star has done it all in the sport. He has won 3 Daytona 500s and 60 races overall, but is the winningest driver in the history of the Cup series without a championship to his name. Just as it looked like he would finally get over the line, a late caution flag sent the race into overtime. And after taking four tires on his pitstop, he was passed by Kyle Larson, who only took two.
Unfortunately for Hamlin, he couldn’t catch back up to pass Larson, who won his second championship.
INCREDIBLE DAY. INCREDIBLE SCENES. đŸ¤¯
Kyle Larson is FIRED up as a two-time NASCAR Champion đŸ”¥ pic.twitter.com/spTs0foaHb
— NASCAR on NBC (@NASCARonNBC) November 3, 2025
The sudden change at the finish only exacerbated calls from racing fans who are completely over the one race championship that has rewarded drivers who have not been at the top of the standings throughout the season. In 2024, NASCAR champion Joey Logano wouldn’t have even finished in the Top 10 of a full season championship. In 2025, Xfinity Series phenom Connor Zillisch failed to win the title at Phoenix in spite of an incredible 10 win season.
The playoff debate has created a divide throughout the NASCAR world that may be as deep as any sport at the moment. The series is facing an existential crisis in not only the playoff situation, but its new television deals that has seen way more races on cable and streaming lead to falling ratings and exposure.
In spite of being on the wrong end of the championship outcome, Denny Hamlin in his true blunt fashion told NASCAR fans hoping for seismic change or a return to the good old days that it is not in the cards on his Actions Detrimental podcast this week.
“It doesn’t make me want to race right now in this moment anymore. They could say 36 races, which they’re not, everyone just get over it. You’re going to get playoffs,” Hamlin said. “But the offseason is still so fresh I want nothing to do with racing still, right now.”
And in his typically outspoken nature, Denny Hamlin also shouted out himself and other top drivers in saying that they wanted a larger pool of races to decide a champion instead of a smaller sample size that has produced more random winners.
“For people like myself, William Byron, Kyle Larson, Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, I think we’re all for a bigger sample size. I think if I didn’t list your name, of course you love the one race playoff because it rewards mediocrity for the bulk of the season and it allows you to just, you’ve never had one ripped out of your hands. You’ve taken out of people’s hands, but you’ve never had it ripped out. So you don’t know what that feels like, you don’t know what it feels like to dominate a season and then all of a sudden a format or whatever keeps resetting the score on you and then finally you end up losing in overtime.”
When NASCAR released their 2026 schedule, they included 10 races that are marked as playoff races. Whether that means they’re sticking with the current tiered rounds of eliminations, shifting to a multi-race championship round, or even returning to the original 10-race “Chase for the Championship” format remains to be seen.
But a return to the good old days of a full season format that has been championed by series legend Mark Martin and others throughout the sport looks more and more likely not to come to fruition in 2026.
About Matt Yoder