What Does The NASCAR All-Star Race Mean?

The 2022 NASCAR All-Star Race at Texas Motor Speedway ran to mixed reviews in 2022, with many openly questioning the relevance of the race and citing the distance teams have to travel now that it’s no longer in Charlotte, the expense, and the lack of down-time in the schedule as a reason to reconsider the race’s place on the schedule.

The All-Star event has evolved into much more of a spectacle than it was in 1985. It’s longer, it now features three transfers from the Open race and a fan-voter participant, and it pays a cool $1 million to win. Once a short feature not all that different than you might see at your local short track, it grew over the years to feature not only more laps, but all kinds of crazy ways to qualify and to set the field for different parts of the race.

The format has changed many times over the years, featuring inverted lineups, eliminations, pit stops under various rules, and even a convoluted formula of setting the last segment that required a computer program and/or a degree in Calculus to figure out.

We’ve also seen support features ranging from concerts and stunts (with or without explosions) to races for crew chiefs and the drivers’ wives (not at the same time) and burnout contests that nobody knew (or cared about) the rules for.

The races themselves have had mixed reviews. NASCAR has sometimes used them as a testing ground for new rules packages (unwise as no All-Star format is like a 400 to 500-mile race), and teams certainly have used them to try setups (not always strictly legal ones—see Jeff Gordon’s T-Rex experiment in 1997) and as a test session for upcoming races, particularly when it was held at Charlotte just before the Coca-Cola 600.

It’s been a rare event that a driver who raced in in the Open or won the fan vote has won the main event, though it has happened (Michael Waltrip in 1996, Ryan Newman in ’02 and fan-vote winner Kasey Kahne in ’08).

But does it really mean anything?

Well, maybe.

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