The prevailing opinion this season, when talking about the return of The Chase for the NASCAR Cup Series Championship, is that a driver will need to be seeded inside the top-six to have a legitimate shot at winning the championship.
Ryan Preece skirted his way into The Chase this year, winning the regular-season finale at Daytona International Speedway and narrowly taking the final spot in the post-season from Shane Van Gisbergen, leaving him as the 16th and final seed.
He disagrees.
“I don’t believe that. Not at all because I think those guys are going to race the hell out of each other and if they have a couple of bad races, there’s no win, and you’re in to get to the next round,” Preece said. “It’s going to be tough to make up those points, so if you’re a team that puts 10 great weeks together and wins races and gets stage points, the fact that you’re in the top-16, I hate to tell you, just because you’re 16th in points doesn’t mean you didn’t execute a great season.”
“We didn’t luck into that win on Saturday. We ran up front. We executed. We did everything we needed to do as a Cup-winning caliber team. If we show that for the next 10 weeks at tracks that RFK is strong at, we can do it.”
“It’s not easy, but we can do it.”
Maybe it’s a winner’s high from the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona International Speedway, or a surge of confidence out of the RFK Racing organization – seeing as The Chase has a number of tracks that have been historically kind to RFK – but Preece, a native of Berlin, Connecticut, is CONFIDENT.
“I’m going to look at it as I want to freakin’ win,” Preece said. “I want to go out and qualify well. I want to execute stages. I want to be aggressive, and if you do all those things right, don’t make any dumb decisions, don’t second-guess your decisions, you’ll give yourself a shot.”
There’s absolutely nobody questioning that Ryan Preece is an enormous underdog to win the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series Championship, considering he’s the final seed (and just barely squeaked by with getting that), he sits 100 points behind the leader, and he JUST scored his first points-paying NASCAR Cup Series victory.
However, according to Preece, underdogs can win titles too.
“How many times has the underdog gone and won the NCAA Tournament, or a wild card went and won the World Series or the Super Bowl? How many times has somebody been trailing after halftime and come back? It’s not over til it’s over.”
It won’t technically be over until the checkered flag drops at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November, but as far as realistic chances for the title are concerned, it could end pretty early for Preece with a couple of poor – or, at this point – even average runs.
But, in professional sports, confidence can bring you quite a long way.
