Race winnings will no longer be listed in Cup Series box scores

If you’ve looked at the box score from Saturday night’s Sprint Unlimited won by Denny Hamlin, you likely noticed something missing.

That something was a dollar amount for each driver’s race winnings. NASCAR has traditionally listed the money drivers and teams have won after each race. But with the new charter agreement affecting the way the structure of the way money is awarded in the Cup Series, those winnings will no longer be publicly available.

From NBC Sports:

(NASCAR Chief Operating Officer Brent) Dewar said it didn’t make sense to provide winnings that are listed according to drivers, which was misleading because the money actually was awarded to teams. Dewar contrasted it to a PGA event, where the listed winnings actually go directly to the golfer.

“Whether you divide it and say it’s a little bit of this, little bit of that and publish it on Monday, we don’t think it’s value-added because it’s not like golf,” he said. “Golf publishes that. We don’t publish at the end of the NBA score that LeBron made $4 million for free throws. It’s not contemporary. Our fans get change.”

Dewar’s last sentence is true. NASCAR fans have come to understand that change is the only thing that feels constant in the Sprint Cup Series at times. And many fans didn’t understand how race winnings were calculated anyway with the myriad of contingency programs affecting the dollar amounts. In the 2015 August race at Bristol, Carl Edwards’ race winnings were listed at $121,995 for finishing seventh while Martin Truex Jr. had a dollar amount of $127,175 for finishing 28th.

But while the dollar amount wasn’t easily explainable, it’s been a constant in box scores. And now it’s gone; likely because those numbers would have been different from previous years because of the charter agreement and thus even harder to explain. As mart of the charter agreement, the 36 teams that have charters received a chunk of a guaranteed pool of money awarded based off performance.

So in honor of the death of race winnings in box scores, here are the 20 drivers with the most race winnings in Cup Series history before the 2015 season and where they stack up vs. a few notable drivers in history

(Jimmie Johnson would have likely passed Jeff Gordon publicly in 2016)

1. Jeff Gordon $153,703,667
2. Jimmie Johnson $150,926,713
3. Tony Stewart $122,231,607
4. Matt Kenseth $113,970,664
5. Kevin Harvick $113,684,954
6. Dale Earnhardt Jr. $95,680,982
7. Kurt Busch $90,042,780
8. Jeff Burton $88,262,142
9. Mark Martin $88,097,586
10. Ryan Newman $87,589,974
11. Carl Edwards $80,473,708
12. Kyle Busch $78,728,537
13. Bobby Labonte $78,107,696
14. Greg Biffle $75,607,550
15. Kasey Kahne $71,438,091
16. Denny Hamlin $70,035,595
17. Jamie McMurray $67,171,087
18. Clint Bowyer $60,614,031
19. Dale Jarrett $59,866,764
20. Martin Truex Jr. $54,456,526
84. Richard Petty, $8,541,210
101. Cale Yarborough $5,642,435
125. David Pearson $2,836,220