Martin's Persistence Led to Massive Change in NASCAR Title Format

"I feel like we won. I do."

Those were the thoughts expressed by Mark Martin on Monday afternoon, after NASCAR finally announced its anticipated new championship format. And while the sanctioning body's change ultimately amounted to a step backward in time, there is real hope that it could lead to a step forward in fan sentiment. If this change can stop the bleeding for NASCAR, which has hemorrhaged television viewership and overall popularity over the last two decades, the industry will owe a massive debt of gratitude to Martin.

Sure, the end result, a 10-race Chase Format, wasn't the 36-race championship format that Mark Martin heavily campaigned for, but the NASCAR Hall of Famer's persistence in NASCAR's Playoff Committee meetings led to a significant change in NASCAR's philosophy. And with the change, a bridge, which could help the sport work its way back to a full-season championship format someday, has been constructed.

As Martin said in Monday's press conference, it's a much more attainable goal to transition from a 10-race chase to a full-season format than it is to achieve that from the Playoff format that has been in place since 2014.

Martin deserves the credit because he endured the gauntlet as part of NASCAR's Playoff Committee. Martin, who was one of -- if not the only -- person chiming for a full-season format in that first meeting, recalls feeling a contentious vibe in regard to his thoughts that the "Playoffs" needed to be shelved in that Committee meeting. After the meeting concluded, the 40-time NASCAR Cup Series race winner had legitimate concerns about how his passionate thoughts would impact his overall standing in the sport's landscape.

I asked @markmartin how difficult it was to wake up each day, and he the guy beating the full-season championship drum as it wasn’t what the industry, outside of fans, seemed to want. He said he was 50% embarrassed, 50% worried he had tarnished his legacy in the sport. pic.twitter.com/n10h7LrsiS
— Toby Christie (@Toby_Christie) January 12, 2026

"I was 50% embarrassed, and 50% concerned that I had tarnished the respect that the industry had for me," Martin admitted in a media scrum following Monday's championship format announcement. "It was pretty ugly."

Martin, 67, continued, "You could hear a pin drop when I first -- I was the first one to speak. They wanted to open it up for someone to say [something], and I was like, 'Well, I'll start,' and I just laid it out there, like you would your buddy, because they need that."

While his thoughts were considered against the grain in boardrooms, Martin was emboldened by the fact that a return to a more consistency-based championship format is what fans desperately desired.

"You see, everyone inside this circle, they can't see outside the circle. That circle encompasses the race fans at the racetrack, but there [are] millions of race fans. Not 50,000 or 100,000, there [are] millions. And I felt like I was in touch with those fans," Martin explained. "Everywhere I went, every short track I went to, all the interactions pointed to 'Lay off the Playoffs,' so I decided my voice could be louder than theirs."

The shock that caused the room to go silent could have been from the notion that not everybody wanted the Playoffs, or it could have simply been due to who was raising the passionate opinion to return to the full-season championship format.

During his racing career, Martin admittedly was hesitant to express his opinion as he knew it could potentially impact his overall livelihood. What that resulted in was a driver who was immensely successful on the track but notoriously quiet in interviews, especially when it came to governance of the sport. Now, a retired driver simply wanting to see the sport he loved return to its former glory, Martin had nothing to lose aside from his hard card, which grants him access to the race track each and every week.

Ben Kennedy, Executive Vice President of NASCAR, recalls Martin being the first person to express their opinion in the opening Playoff Committee meeting, and admits that he was a little bit surprised to see that Martin was one of the most impassioned people involved in the process.

"Tim [Clark] had kicked off the meeting and opened it up to the floor. I don't think Mark had a chance to get there, so he was virtual. And he was the first person to speak," Kennedy said. "He had a very particular viewpoint, and he was one of the loudest voices in the room."

Martin says his perception of the initial reaction to his thoughts was jarring, and he felt that he had already overstayed his welcome on the Playoff Committee after just one meeting.

"[After the first meeting] I texted [Tim Clark], and said, 'Well, I guess that's the last time I'll be invited to be on a committee.' That's how bad I felt. I really felt like I had embarrassed myself," Martin said.

Surprisingly, Martin was not barred from the meetings, and as he pressed on, his movement gained more and more support from race fans on social media and from other people within the committee. Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was part of the Playoff committee, says Martin's tenacity in the first meeting helped him gain the confidence to fight for the full-season championship format, which he admits he feels is the best way to decide a champion in NASCAR.

"When Mark spoke up in the first meeting early about the 36 [race championship format], and then I started getting a little more confident too," Earnhardt recalled. "Like, hey man, why not?"

Despite the building momentum, Martin says that he didn't feel the mood drastically shifted in the in the next committee meeting

"The second meeting that we had, there still was no hope for anything less than a Playoff. One of the last words there was [that] they can't see how anything other than a Playoff would be something that would be suitable, that coming from a NASCAR official."

However, after the second meeting, Martin started to feel the winds of change starting to spark up.

"I think once I started breaking ice after like the second committee meeting, I think it started to gain traction, and people started to see that there was a stronger sentiment for all of this," Martin said.

Even with the shift in momentum, Martin still felt, up until the decision was made, that a 10-race chase format was a pie-in-the-sky hope as he internally thought NASCAR and the industry as a whole seemed hell-bent on keeping an elimination-style Playoff, of some form, in place going forward.

Martin was convinced that NASCAR would be heading toward a Playoff format consisting of a three-race or four-race final Playoff round, which was floated by "prominent people on the committee," and he personally expressed to NASCAR through a message at the final committee meeting that he would support a 10-race Chase format, and "anything less, I'm out."

Again, while the final result wasn't the complete vision Martin had for the NASCAR championship format, the legendary racer is beyond thrilled with how close he, and the committee were able to get the format changed to a full-season format. And while it's easy to be frustrated by even a 10-race Chase format for some fans, Martin says that there were a lot more loopholes for NASCAR, and the committee to jump through than simply picking any format they wanted, and pushing forward.

"We came a long way. It was a lot harder fight, it was a lot harder than people understand," Martin said. "And [as] we said in the press conference, it affects so many people. It affects television, it affects race tracks. Some of those race tracks really like having a cutoff race. You know, it affects a lot of contracts between teams and sponsors, drivers, whatever. And so, one of those things, if you went straight to 36 races from the Playoffs, that turned a lot of those things upside down and created problems because there were contracts that now had to be sorted out, basically, nearly to some degree, possibly renegotiated. So, it was pretty complicated. I think it's a big win. I never thought we would get to 10 races. I think it checks all the boxes, I think everyone gets a good bit of what they want."

With the new NASCAR championship format in place for 2026, and beyond, we can now sit back, and evaluate how the change will ultimately impact NASCAR's position in the American sport landscape. While there is still plenty of work to be done by the sanctioning body to earn fans, that it has lost over the years, back, there is hope that this championship format change can serve as a catalyst to help expedite that process.

And if it does, there should probably be an entire "Mark Martin wing" established at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, NC. If this revitalizes the sport, what Martin would have accomplished in the NASCAR Playoff Committee will be far more impactful than anything he accomplished over his illustrious NASCAR driving career, and Martin accomplished quite a bit on the racetrack.

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