Source: BroBible
Summary
Ryan Preece won the Daytona race, securing a spot in the 2026 Chase for the championship. The article details the NASCAR Cup Series power rankings as the regular season ends. Denny Hamlin leads the standings, with Ryan Blaney and Chase Elliott close behind. Several drivers, including Kyle Larson and Joey Logano, are evaluated based on recent performance and potential in the Chase.
Our Reading
The routine arrives with confidence.
Preece’s win is a miracle, but it’s just a reset. Drivers who were down are now up, and the Chase is a new game.
Hamlin is the favorite, but that’s been said before. Blaney and Elliott have the speed, but not the luck.
Chase Briscoe and Christopher Bell are always close, but never quite there.
It’s not a comeback—it’s a rebrand. The same old race, just with new numbers.
Author: Evan Null
2026 NASCAR Cup Series Power Rankings: Week 26
Over the last two months, we’ve written at length about how tiers had begun to form in our weekly NASCAR power rankings. Those tiers later solidified, with only the back end of the rankings seeing regular significant movement.
Now, you can throw that all out the window.
With the end of the regular season comes a points reset for the 16 drivers who will now contend for a NASCAR Cup Series championship. And while the drivers who finished at the top of the standings in the regular season will have a points buffer to start the 10-race chase, it won’t be nearly as substantial as it was beforehand.
Here’s what our latest set of rankings looks like as we end the 2026 Chase for a championship.
10) Ryan Preece
Preece had spent the majority of the last month lingering just outside our power rankings in the 14th-16th range. However, it’s easy to justify such a sizable jump.
For one, it’s hard to imagine a bigger confidence boost entering the Chase than to qualify in the manner that Preece did. On top of that, seemingly every driver we’ve ranked No. 10 in recent weeks has fallen on hard times. Hopefully for Preece’s sake, that isn’t a sign of things to come.
But he now goes from hundreds of points behind leader Denny Hamlin to just one-hundred back thanks to the reset, and while he may not seem like a title contender, it’s easy to see a world in which Preece continues his climb up the standings in the weeks to come.
9) Chase Elliott
Chase Elliott’s season has fizzled of sorts in the late summer months after winning a pair of races early in the season. In fact, he remains the only Hendrick Motorsports driver with a win this season, despite three making the Chase.
However, Elliott showed good speed at Daytona and looked like perhaps the best car in the field at times during the second stage.
Now, with the points reset, Elliott is back in the game, and while his team hasn’t shown the speed to compete with drivers like Hamlin, Ryan Blaney, and others for the championship, we’ve seen drivers get hot at the right time in the past, and there’s no reason to believe Elliott can replicate that.
8) Joey Logano
Unlike Elliott, Joey Logano’s season has been on the upswing in the last month or so. Logano won multiple races in that span and climbed from entirely outside of the Chase altogether to the ninth seed entering it.
Beyond that, the three-time series champion, as well as crew chief Paul Wolfe, have already shown that they’re up to the task of rising to the occasion when the stakes are the highest.
The concern for him, however, is whether Ford and Team Penske can deliver the equipment necessary, particularly on intermediate tracks, to win a fourth championship. We should learn a lot at Darlington, a track where he finished 33rd, well off the pace, in the Spring.
7) Kyle Larson
We’re now nearly a full season-and-a-half of Larson not winning a race, an unthinkable stretch for a driver that many fans and many of those in the garage area believe is the most talented in the series.
Now, some of that is on Hendrick Motorsports for not bringing fast cars to the track. However, a lot of it also falls on Larson, who has made several unforced errors while in position to contend for wins.
If those errors continue into the Chase, Larson will be a non-factor, as he’s been for much of the year. But if they disappear, suddenly a season to forget for the defending series champ could turn into the potential to go back-to-back.
