Sunday’s NASCAR All-Star Race comes at the 1/3 mark of the 2026 NASCAR Cup Series season, with 12 of 36 races in the books. 

Thanks to his white-hot start, 23XI Racing driver Tyler Reddick leads the Cup Series standings by a whopping 129-points over second-place Denny Hamlin, while defending All-Star Race winner Christopher Bell sits 11th in the standings and Watkins Glen winner Shane van Gisbergen holds the 16th and final provisional Chase slot. 

The All-Star Race may just be an exhibition event with only money and no points on the line, but it can be an indicator of what’s to come for a driver and their team. Here are how past All-Star Race winners fared after taking the checkered flag. 

13 ASR winners went on to win the championship

It makes sense that an event made up of NASCAR’s best saw its winners go on to hoist the Cup Series championship trophy at season’s end. It’s happened 13 times in the 41 years that the All-Star race has been around.

Interestingly, the first All-Star Race winner, Darrell Waltrip, went on to win his third and final Cup Series title with Junior Johnson in 1985. In fact, four of the first six drivers to win the All-Star Race went on to win the title: Waltrip in 1985, Dale Earnhardt in 1987, Rusty Wallace in 1989 and Earnhardt again in 1990. 

Earnhardt would be the next driver to win both the All-Star Race and Cup Series title in the same year, doing so in 1993. 

Over the last 32 years, however, winning both the All-Star Race and championship has been a much more infrequent occurrence. In fact, it’s only happened a quarter of the time (8/32 years), with Jeff Gordon accomplishing the feat thrice and Jimmie Johnson doing so twice. 

Hendrick Motorsports has been responsible for seven of those eight occurrences, as in addition to Gordon and Johnson’s combined five ASR/championship seasons, Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson won the All-Star Race and championship in the same season in 2020 and 2021, respectively. 

The last driver to win the All-Star Race and Cup title in the same year was Joey Logano in 2024. Logano was the first Ford driver to win the All-Star Race and the championship in the same campaign. 

Carl Edwards won the 2011 All-Star Race but came up on the wrong end of a tiebreaker with Tony Stewart that decided the 2011 championship. 

Only two ASR winners have missed the postseason

The NASCAR postseason has been around since 2004, but only two of 22 All-Star Race winners have gone on to miss it and not compete for the championship. 

The first was Kasey Kahne in 2008, who missed the Chase despite winning a pair of races during the season. Jamie McMurray is the only other driver to win the All-Star Race but miss the Chase, doing so in 2014. Like Kahne in 2008, McMurray finished 18th in the final standings.

Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, McMurray’s final official Cup Series win came at Talladega in the fall of 2013, less than a year before he won the ASR at Charlotte. 

Bell, who won the 2025 All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro, won three of the first four Cup races in 2025 but found Victory Lane only once over the final 32 events. He finished fifth in the final standings after missing the Championship 4.