Biggest moments of the NASCAR Cup Series regular season

Hindsight is 20/20, and 19 of the 35 full-time drivers in the NASCAR Cup Series will not race for a championship over the final 10 races of the 2026 season. 

Sixteen drivers made the Chase and are still alive for the Cup Series championship. Ryan Preece claimed the 16th and final spot with his win at Daytona, which bumped Shane van Gisbergen out of the postseason. 

While the final Chase seedings took shape on Saturday, there was a host of other moments throughout the 26-race regular season that shaped the Chase field. Here are the biggest moments that, in hindsight, changed the course of the season. 

Shane van Gisbergen's crash in San Diego

Stephen Doran's decision to bring van Gisbergen down pit road in the closing laps of Saturday's race may be more fresh on the minds of fans, given that SVG finished 28th and missed the Chase by only 17 points. 

 But a crash in the June 21 race at Naval Base Coronado may have been the bigger moment for the No. 97 team. 

Van Gisbergen, along with Austin Hill and Connor Zilisch, was collected in a massive crash on the Stage 2 restart. Had van Gisbergen not wrecked out, it's likely the road course ace would've finished inside the top 10 or top five, or maybe even have challenged Corey Heim for the win. 

Instead, he finished 38th. That may have been the difference between SVG making and missing the Chase, but he'll have to wait another year before making a run at the postseason. 

Any of Christopher Bell's seven runner-up finishes

Bell has finished runner-up a remarkable seven times this season without winning once. The difference between first and second is 20 points, meaning a difference of one position in each of those seven races could've given Bell an extra 140 points. 

If two of those runner-ups were wins, Bell, who is the No. 6 seed, would've ended the regular season in fifth. If all seven of those second-place results were flipped to wins, he'd have ended up third by a hair over Tyler Reddick. 

There's an inherent pain that comes with coming up just shy of winning a NASCAR race, but the championship implications for Bell and the No. 20 team have to sting, too. 

Bubba Wallace's penalty at Atlanta

Wallace went from finishing runner-up in the July 12 race at Atlanta to ending up with a 29th-place result after he incurred a last-lap penalty for going below the double-white line on the backstretch, a no-no at drafting tracks. 

The 27 points he lost don't seem like a lot until you realize that Wallace, who is the No. 14 seed, finished only 26 points behind Chris Buescher, the No. 10 seed. If Wallace doesn't earn that penalty at Atlanta, he'd be 10th in the standings entering the Chase and only 70 behind leader Denny Hamlin rather than 90.