INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. (Dec. 12) — Mark Richards is proud that driver Hudson O’Neal and the Rocket Chassis house car team captured the 2023 Lucas Oil Late Model Dirt Series championship, but that it came in the national tour’s winner-take-all, one-race playoff doesn’t sit well with the longtime team owner’s racing sensibilities.

“We took advantage of it in '23 with Hudson,” Richards said on Friday night at the tour’s postseason banquet at Lucas Oil Stadium. “It’s the way they set it up, but truthfully, it doesn't feel like a championship when you win it that way.”

So Richards was among those glad to hear series director Rick Schwallie, in the banquet's concluding remarks, reveal Friday night that the tour will return to what he called a “traditional points format” in 2026 after three seasons of the Big River Steel Chase for the Championship, a four-driver playoff mimicking NASCAR’s system instituted more than 20 years ago.

Calling NASCAR’s system “a flop,” Richards said he’s “always for the best guy should win the championship,” and that comes through counting season-long points to see who comes out on top.

Three-time series champion Jonathan Davenport of Blairsville, Ga., hasn’t revealed his Double L Motorsports team’s plans for 2026 — he promised some “exciting news” after Christmas — but he’s glad to see the Lucas Oil Series reestablishing its original points system, adding there are pros and cons to both styles of deciding a champion.

“I think the traditional way obviously is the season-long deal where somebody can’t catch a hot streak at the end of the year, or somebody be good all year and then wreck a car or have bad luck, or whatever, at the end of the year,” said Davenport, who finished third in the 2025 playoffs. “It’s definitely a good thing for the sport to go back and to be a true champion, to be able to win in Florida all the way through the end of the year.”

Garrett Alberson of Las Cruces, N.M., who has fallen short of reaching the four-driver playoffs each season, calls season-long points tabulation the “most fair” for drivers.

The playoff system “definitely changes the kind of stress on that part of the year, I would say, maybe for, like, the four guys that are in there,” Alberson said. “I think in general, for a driver, I don’t know if it changes your job a whole lot. You pretty much go do your best every night. Personally, it doesn’t change a whole lot. The goal is to put it up front every night and get the most points you can every night. I think it’s going to be a cool thing. The guy who does the best all year, we’ll know for sure.”

Schwallie, who said the tour’s $1.2 million points fund will remain the same, said details would be announced soon about additional bonus programs for late-season events at tracks that had enjoyed the playoff hype. An official told DirtonDirt that the decision to return to the traditional points format came before Thursday’s announced series acquisition by FloSports, the digital media rights company that has streamed series events for nearly four seasons.

Schwallie had no regrets in experimenting with a new points system that received mixed reviews.

“We tried something. We wanted to elevate our program. We more than doubled our points fund in that time,” he said from the podium. “In those three years, we had clients like Big River Steel and ARP that helped us doing that, and really we wouldn’t be here — over $1.2 million today (for the points fund) — if it wasn’t for that.

“So I don’t look back on that as any sort of failure by any stretch of the imagination. I really think it was a success. It took us to new places, and a place that’s more lucrative for our race teams. But I also think that we’re at a place where we tried different formats, different tweaks to that format. Here we are, three years later, we’re going to just return to a traditional format for next year and the points fund will remain the same.”

After 2023’s one-race playoff at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, the four playoff drivers competed over a handful of late-season races in 2024-25. Devin Moran of Dresden, Ohio, earned a record $250,000 for winning 2025’s title.

Richards says season-long points “takes all the doubt and all the rhetoric out of it that ‘so and so had a better year.’ This way here, the guy that has the best year will win the championship, and I think it's great for the sport.

"I understand why they had to do it in order to get that kind of money brought into it, they had to have a different plan to get more sponsors into it and all that. Rick's done a great job with it, but I think we're headed in a new direction and I think there's more that will be coming out here before long.”

Editor’s note: Kyle McFadden reporting from Indianapolis; remote writing and editing by managing editor Todd Turner.