The Charlotte Motor Speedway road course, better known by its trademarked “Roval” moniker, will be replaced by the track’s 1.5-mile oval on this season’s NASCAR schedule.
That news comes from The Athletic’s Jordan Bianchi, whose report Monday landed like discovering a long-forgotten NASCAR T-shirt is suddenly a “vintage” item worth hundreds of dollars.
What’s old is new again in NASCAR, continuing a trend that could hardly be better to start 2026.
Heck, let’s look at what we wrote about the Roval in this space last fall: “Continuing to run races at the Roval each year is the most obvious, low-hanging fruit for change in all of NASCAR — which is saying a lot when the sport’s fan base and drivers have long been asking for more horsepower and a playoff format revision.”
Well, guess what? It’s not even the end of January, and we’ve already seen all three of those things put into action. The “playoffs” are gone (welcome back, Chase for the Cup!), horsepower levels have been raised for 20 races this season and now the oval is replacing the Roval in the fall.
Three cheers for common-sense changes!
As frequently documented during the discourse about this topic — It’s not you, dear Roval. It’s the car.
In the first four editions of the Roval race, the circuit never scored below 83 percent “Yes” in my weekly “Was it a good race?” poll on X. Road courses were all the rage in NASCAR at the time, which is why the number of those layouts ballooned from two to six on the schedule.
It was intermediate ovals which were the boring ones back then — hard to believe now, since we’re so used to them being elite in the Next Gen car. Still, the road course love made all the sense in the world when Marcus Smith built the Roval inside Charlotte Motor Speedway, and his experiment initially paid off in a big way.
When the Next Gen car debuted in 2022, well, the sentiment flipped. None of the Next Gen races on the Roval rated better than 59 percent “Yes,” while all of the full-distance Next Gen races on the oval have scored over 90 percent so far.
Removing the Roval from the schedule was not only a logical call, but one that will actively improve the season — particularly when it really counts during the Chase for the Cup. The Charlotte oval will be Race No. 6 of the 10-race championship, and it could well be a major factor in narrowing the field.
The title battle should be down to perhaps a half-dozen drivers by that point, and Charlotte’s result will leave only Phoenix, Talladega, Martinsville and Homestead to decide the 2026 champion. It also gives the Chase another old-school feel: Five intermediate tracks (also Darlington, Kansas and Las Vegas) in the 10 races, which is how it used to be for much of this championship format’s original version.
Most drivers will react with the same sentiment as Carson Hocevar when he posted a “W” on Monday on X. A few, like his Spire Motorsports teammate Michael McDowell, will respond publicly or at the very least in their own heads, “L” in response. Still, the critics of this news will be largely road-course aces like McDowell or Shane van Gisbergen, whereas the traditional oval drivers almost all wanted to see this change.
The biggest concern over the Roval-to-oval switch is that it leaves the Chase with less variety. There are no road courses in the final 10 races, and NASCAR previously has said it liked the champion to navigate all different types of layouts.
In reality, though, this is why the Chase is back in the first place: NASCAR fans have wanted fewer pitfalls and land mines for the top contenders, preferring to see the best of the best race it out. Another intermediate oval will give them that chance, and NASCAR can always do a course correction for next year’s schedule if necessary.
Ultimately, the reaction is going to be highly favorable. Last fall, Joey Logano said he’d prefer to run the race on the oval but qualified his answer with: “What fans think is best is probably going to be what we do anyway.”
We polled those fans on this topic in 2024, and three-quarters indicated they preferred the oval to the Roval. And since then, you can bet Smith noticed how some were increasingly speaking with their wallets, as the Roval’s crowds were a far cry from earlier editions.
The oval news should boost attendance as well, and why not? It’s a reason to be excited about the race in a genuine, non-gimmicky way.
Again, that fits exactly what NASCAR is doing so far this season: A return to the roots with its “Hell Yeah” campaign and injecting some authenticity back into a sport that had been struggling to find its way in recent years.