I’m not a NASCAR fan.
That’s not to say I dislike NASCAR. Disliking it would imply a level of attention I’ve simply never given it. I love motorsport, but my loyalties sit with Formula 1, with the occasional excursion into Supercars, the World Endurance Championship and my own 25-year-old Alfa-turned-race-car.
NASCAR, meanwhile, has always existed somewhere way off in the distance. I knew the basics — big stock cars, big ovals, even bigger crashes. Outside of this, it is a foreign language. Literally. Someone would mention “the apron” and I’d assume NASCAR had a surprisingly active baking scene.
And, if I’m being brutally honest, I never really understood the appeal. Going around and around an oval seemed like the antithesis of everything I enjoyed about circuit racing. Where are the corners? The elevation changes? The heroic late-braking manoeuvres? The right turns?
But I do love racing games. So when NASCAR 26 landed in front of me, I was curious. Not whether it was a good NASCAR game — I’m spectacularly unqualified to answer that.
I wanted to know whether it could make someone who doesn’t care about NASCAR actually care about NASCAR.
It turns out the answer is yes. Annoyingly, quite a big yes.
Sweet Home… Daytona
NASCAR 26 opens with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama, which is frankly so committed to the bit that I immediately respected it.
From there, my NASCAR education began at Daytona.
One of the things NASCAR 26 does particularly well is acknowledge that some people arriving here might not know their apron from their elbow. There’s a training feature that uses actual NASCAR driver Jamie McMurray (who, I’m told, won the 2010 Daytona 500) as a coach, complete with telemetry comparisons showing things like throttle application and racing lines. For someone whose NASCAR strategy prior to this consisted largely of “turn left and avoid the wall”, this was useful.
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These coaching sessions introduced a bunch of NASCAR concepts: drafting, running different lines, using the apron (which I now know is the flat area on the inside). When to lift, when to stay planted and, perhaps most importantly, when to stop trying to overtake absolutely everybody immediately.
I particularly loved the telemetry. Seeing exactly where I was losing time turned practice into something tangible. It therefore seems bizarre that this level of data isn’t more readily available elsewhere, particularly during qualifying.
You have built this lovely little window into how I’m driving. Let me look through it.
The Magical World of Turning Right
In career mode, it took me eight race weekends to reach a road circuit. It was Watkins Glen, followed not long afterwards by Lime Rock.
They both exposed the compromise in NASCAR 26’s handling rather quickly.
The cars feel reasonably deft and very manageable on an oval, but throw them through a conventional sequence of corners and suddenly you’re trying to thread a barge through a go-kart circuit.
There’s plenty of understeer, or push, as I have now learned to say because apparently I am assimilating. Some of that can be dialled out through setup, but “delicate” is not a word that ever came to mind.
I’d spent the first hour or two waiting for NASCAR 26 to give me a “proper” circuit. But what surprised me is that by the time it finally did, I wanted to get back to the ovals.
I Have Seen the Oval-Shaped Light
Something strange had happened. I’d started enjoying the ovals — really enjoying them.
There is something unexpectedly mesmerising about NASCAR racing. Once you’re settled into a rhythm, running centimetres from the wall at thoroughly irresponsible speeds, the whole thing becomes strangely meditative. I found myself slipping into a sort of stock-car trance.
This was the first misconception NASCAR 26 managed to dismantle for me. Ovals, I discovered, aren’t boring I’d simply misunderstood the racecraft.
In a conventional circuit racing game, every braking zone is an invitation to send the car somewhere it probably shouldn’t go. NASCAR 26 asks for considerably more patience.
You’re watching the cars ahead. Building momentum. Sitting in the draft. Working out whether the high line or low line is moving. Waiting for the gap rather than simply manufacturing one through an act of digital violence.
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And while “variety” might be generous when almost every corner still points in broadly the same direction, I was surprised by how different the ovals actually felt.
Some are enormous, flowing things where you’re virtually flat-out and tiny steering inputs become enormously important. Others are shorter, tighter and considerably more physical, asking you to get the car slowed down, wrestle its considerable mass through the corner and get back onto the throttle without washing into the wall.
It’s Still Got Some Weird Stuff
NASCAR 26 certainly isn’t flawless. There are lots of little omissions that feel bizarre in a modern racing game. Split times. Fastest-lap information. More accessible driving data. Things I’ve become so accustomed to that their absence feels immediately conspicuous.
The career mode didn’t blow me away, either. There’s enough happening between races to give the career some sense of consequence, but it is certainly no Codemasters F1 game. I did, however, appreciate being able to scale race length. You can compress events into short blasts or stretch them into much more substantial races where weather, tyre management and pit strategy begin to matter. That’s an unusual amount of flexibility for a career mode, and it meant I could decide exactly how much NASCAR I wanted injected directly into my evening.
Visually, it’s generally a handsome game, built in Unreal Engine 5. But there are some oddities. Tyre smoke is extraordinarily enthusiastic, for example. While damage is remarkably shy about revealing itself, even when introducing the side of my stock car to concrete at 170 mph.
There are real-world video clips and familiar NASCAR personalities (well, not to me — but I assume to familiar NASCAR fans) dotted throughout. Well, familiar to NASCAR fans. Not me. But it helped sell the atmosphere.
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I even liked the incorporation of real-world podcast-style content, although the actual conversations I encountered were so bland and disconnected from what I was doing that I almost always skipped them.
You can also do a celebratory burnout after winning. I did one. It was brilliant. I have felt no need to do another.
Wait, Do I Like NASCAR Now?
I went into it expecting to tolerate the NASCAR part because I love racing games. Instead, I came away actually understanding the appeal, because NASCAR 26 did such a good job of explaining why it works.
I understand the patience, the strategy, why the draft matters. Why moving between the high and low lines is actually more interesting than it sounds. Why thirty-odd cars running centimetres apart at enormous speeds creates a completely different sort of tension to attempting an overtake move in Eau Rouge.
Most importantly, I stopped seeing an oval as a circuit with half the corners missing.
There are deeper racing games. There are prettier racing games. There are career modes with considerably more going on. And actual NASCAR devotees will undoubtedly notice details, inaccuracies and omissions that sailed several metres over my head.
But that’s precisely why NASCAR 26 worked so well as my introduction. It didn’t require me to already love NASCAR — instead, it took me on a journey and taught me why other people do.
And somewhere between my hundredth left turn, a bruised thumb and Sweet Home Alabama rattling around my skull, I realised I might finally be one of them.
NASCAR 26 is out now on Xbox X|S, Playstation 5 and PC via Steam.
Access to NASCAR 26 was supplied by the publisher.
