Sunday afternoon at the Monster Mile, NASCAR will run the All-Star Race at Dover for the first time in the event's forty-one-year history.
That alone is a piece of news. Dover is the sixth different track to host the All-Star Race, joining a list of prior hosts that includes Charlotte, Bristol, Texas, and North Wilkesboro. The All-Star Race has been at North Wilkesboro the last three years — Christopher Bell won it in 2025 with crew chief Adam Stevens for Joe Gibbs Racing, Joey Logano won in 2024 for Penske, Kyle Larson won in 2023 for Hendrick — and now the showcase moves to Dover, which has never hosted the All-Star Race in any of the event's prior forty-one years.
But the headline isn't the venue. It's the format.
Three segments, no Open
The 2026 NASCAR All-Star Race is three segments — 75 laps, 75 laps, then a 200-lap finale. Three hundred fifty laps total. Three hundred fifty miles. That last segment is what determines the winner, and it features a 26-driver field.
There is no All-Star Open this year. NASCAR scrapped it. The release uses the word "streamlined" and the word "high-intensity," and what those words mean in practice is that there is no preliminary race that sends the bottom of the field into the main event. The 26-driver final-segment field gets set by the eligibility rules below — race winners, past All-Star winners, past champions — then filled out from combined Segment 1 and Segment 2 finishing results until twenty-five, then the Fan Vote winner takes the twenty-sixth spot.
That's a lot to track. Here is the simplest version: every driver in the field starts Sunday's race. The full field runs Segment 1. The full field runs Segment 2 (with the top 26 inverted). After Segment 2, NASCAR sets the 26-driver lineup for the final segment using the eligibility rules below. All laps in all three segments count.
There will be a competition break at or around Lap 225 in the final segment.
Who is locked in already
Seventeen drivers are already in the final segment by virtue of having won a points race in either 2025 or 2026:
William Byron, Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell, Denny Hamlin, Chase Elliott, Tyler Reddick, Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano, Austin Cindric, Ryan Blaney, Josh Berry, Austin Dillon, Chase Briscoe, Ross Chastain, Shane Van Gisbergen, Bubba Wallace, and Kyle Busch.
That's the list. Add the past All-Star Race winners who are full-time and not already on the list, plus the past Cup Series champions who are full-time and not already on the list. Then the remaining positions get filled by combined Segment 1 + Segment 2 finishing results until the field reaches twenty-five. The Fan Vote winner is twenty-six.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr., who signed his multi-year extension with Hyak Motorsports on Monday, is not on the locked-seventeen list. Connor Zilisch, who won Saturday's Mission 200 in the O'Reilly Series and ran second in the Cup race Sunday before a flat tire, is not on the locked-seventeen list either — Zilisch has not won a points-paying Cup race in 2025 or 2026. Both of them will have to make it the long way: through the Segment 1 / Segment 2 finishing-order pipeline, or via the Fan Vote.
Saturday's Pit Crew Challenge IS the qualifying session
The qualifying format is the second story in the format story.
On Saturday, May 16, drivers will take the green flag, run one full lap at speed, and then on Lap 2 proceed to one of two NASCAR-designated pit stalls. The crew will perform a four-tire stop. There is no fuel stop. When the stop is complete, the car exits pit road and races back to the checkered flag. The qualifying time is the total elapsed time from green flag to checkered flag.
Fastest team earns the pole position for Sunday's race.
The team with the fastest pit stop during the qualifying attempt — no penalties — is the winner of the Mechanix Wear Pit Crew Challenge. Pit Crew Challenge results determine the pit selection order for the final race.
Timing lines are established one box behind and one box ahead of the NASCAR-designated pit stop boxes, which means the only way the over-the-wall crew can save time is by executing the stop itself faster — there's no run-up trick, no pit-out trick, just the work between the timing lines.
Why Dover, why this format
The Monster Mile is a one-mile concrete oval with twenty-four-degree banking in both ends and nine-degree banking on the straights. Denny Hamlin owns the qualifying record from October 2019: 166.984 mph, in twenty-one and a half seconds. The track has never hosted an All-Star Race in any format, but it has hosted plenty of other Cup events — the points race typically runs in the spring or fall.
Goodyear is bringing back the same right-side tire that ran at Dover last July — the dedicated Dover concrete tire that hasn't been used since the series visited the venue in July of last year. The left-side is the same one that debuted at Bristol Motor Speedway in April. That combination gives crew chiefs a notebook from one current 2026 race plus one Dover-specific 2025 race to work with going into Saturday's setup.
"Teams will be able to combine their data from Bristol in April with their running from Dover last season to optimize their setups ahead of this weekend," said Rick Heinrich, Goodyear's NASCAR product manager.
Each Cup team gets ten sets of tires this weekend — six for the race, two for the qualifying-and-Pit-Crew-Challenge session, two for practice. Minimum inflation is twenty psi left front, forty-eight right front, twenty-two left rear, forty-four right rear.
The historical anchor
Forty-one All-Star Races have been held since the event's 1985 debut. Jimmie Johnson is the all-time leader with four wins (2003, 2006, 2012, 2013). Kyle Larson leads all active drivers with three wins (2019, 2021, 2023) — and Larson is locked into Sunday's final segment as the active wins leader chasing Johnson's mark. Joey Logano leads all-time in laps led at the All-Star Race with 369 in fifteen starts. Hendrick Motorsports leads all organizations with eleven All-Star wins. Chevrolet leads all manufacturers with twenty-one. Mark Martin leads all-time in starts with twenty-four.
The defending winner is Christopher Bell, with crew chief Adam Stevens at Joe Gibbs Racing. He took the trophy at North Wilkesboro, and he comes into Sunday locked in.
It is a non-points exhibition with no Open. The full field starts. The 26-driver final segment closes the show. Pit road sets the pole on Saturday afternoon. The Monster Mile stages a Cup exhibition race for the first time.
That's the format. We'll cover the racing.