The first All-Star Race at Dover is going to be a marathon.
NASCAR announced the format for this season's exhibition race, and it's complicated. The race is also 350 laps long.
The three-segment race will be divided into two 75-lap segments and a final 200-lap segment. The overall race is just 50 laps shorter than every Cup Series race held at the track since 1997.
Every team will begin the All-Star Race, too. The first two segments will contain every driver and team that entered the race. The field will then be whittled down to 26 drivers — there are 36 full-time teams in the Cup Series — for the final 200 laps.
How the 26 drivers will be decided
Here's where it gets complicated. Bear with us here.
Drivers who have won a race in 2025 and 2026 and all active Cup Series champions and All-Star Race winners are automatically in the third segment.
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Fourteen drivers won a race in 2025 and Tyler Reddick — who went winless last season — has won the first two races of the 2026 season. That's 15 drivers already with Reddick, Denny Hamlin, Shane van Gisbergen, Christopher Bell, Ryan Blaney, Chase Briscoe, William Byron, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott, Austin Cindric, Josh Berry, Austin Dillon, Bubba Wallace, Ross Chastain and Joey Logano.
Full-time drivers who are past Cup Series champions and All-Star Race winners are in too. Kyle Busch fits that criteria. That makes it 16.
At the moment, that leaves 10 open spots for the final segment unless a winless driver from 2025 who isn't named Reddick or Busch wins a race in 2026 before the All-Star Race is held.
Those remaining spots will be filled by the driver who has the most votes in a fan vote and then via drivers' average finish in the first two segments. If seven spots are needed to fill the 26-car field, the seven drivers with the best two-stage average finish will make the field if they aren't already automatically qualified for the final segment.
Got all that? Good. There's one more wrinkle too. The top 26 finishers from the first stage will be inverted before the start of the second stage. That means the driver who wins the first stage will start 26th in the second stage.
All the machinations are NASCAR's latest attempt to inject life into the All-Star Race. The race moved to Dover in 2026 after North Wilkesboro Speedway — the site of the last three All-Star Races — was given a points race this season. The All-Star Race is Dover's only race date of the season as the concrete one-mile oval hasn't produced the most thrilling racing in recent seasons.
