In 2012, Carl Edwards stood before the media at Daytona International Speedway and issued a warning. NASCAR, he said, should never introduce planned caution periods. His words, largely ignored at the time, now ring eerily prophetic as stage racing remains a fixture in 2026.
NASCAR adopted stage racing in 2017, just months after Edwards retired. The format awards points to the top 10 finishers on two predetermined laps per race, with three for the Coca-Cola 600. A playoff point once went to each stage winner. Though playoff points vanished when NASCAR scrapped the knockout playoff format after 12 years, stage racing itself has stayed essentially unchanged.
The only notable adjustment to the points system is that race winners now earn 55 points instead of 40. That change, however, does little to address the structural issues Edwards identified more than a decade ago.
His warning came after Bruton Smith proposed “competition cautions.” Edwards laid out the problem in plain terms. “Let’s just start at the beginning,” he said. “Let’s just lay something out here for you guys. Is it everyone in this room, is it your understanding, that when they throw the green flag, right, that the only reason another flag is going to come out, like a yellow one or a red one, before that checkered flag comes out, [is] if there is a condition on the race track that is unsafe to continue the race – is that what everybody understands?”
He continued, “If we start getting away from that and we say, okay, halfway through the race, we’re going to throw a caution. We’re all going to line back up. Well, now it’s two races, where the first race doesn’t even matter. Now you’ve just got a shorter race.”
Edwards compared it to a basketball game. “The lead in basketball is a figurative one. It’s a score. So it’s as if you stop the quarter in basketball and then you even the score. In racing, I go out there and I gain an advantage, maybe not at this track [Daytona], but at most tracks, I gain a big advantage, that caution erases that advantage. It’s my opinion, my humble opinion, I’m not saying what’s right or wrong, it’s my opinion that that takes something away from the sport.”
The irony is hard to miss. A controversial debris caution at Homestead-Miami Speedway in 2016 robbed Edwards of that year’s championship. NASCAR has since used the debate over such cautions to justify having at least two planned yellow flags per race.
Yet Edwards’ description of the consequences has proven accurate. Stage points water down the importance of a decent race result. Winning two stages, which essentially means leading at two random mid-race laps, is worth the same as gaining 20 positions in the finishing order. A driver can finish outside the top 20 and still end the day second in total points scored.
Credit NASCAR for incentivizing victories with those extra 15 points. But beyond that, stage wins often carry more value than finishing well. That is not what Edwards envisioned for the sport he loved.
Edwards was not the only voice against the idea back in 2012, but his explanation stands as the clearest warning. His abrupt retirement came just before NASCAR implemented the format, and the announcement of stage racing landed less than two weeks after he stepped away. Whether that timing was coincidence remains an open question.
