NASCAR 26 Will Let You Edit Every Driver’s Ratings
NASCAR 26 driver ratings are getting a significant upgrade. Players will be able to manually edit individual scores, and the system is more detailed than any single number could capture. Ratings are split across seven separate track-type categories, each carrying its own score that feeds into an overall. The Trackhouse Racing team revealed the feature in a video released August 28, nearly three weeks before the September 18 launch date.
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Shane van Gisbergen, Ross Chastain, and Connor Zilisch fronted the reveal. The three Trackhouse drivers sat down and rated each other across all seven categories. In the process, they turned what could have been a dry feature announcement into something genuinely worth watching. Seeing active NASCAR drivers debate each other’s in-game scores gave fans the clearest look yet at how NASCAR 26 structures driver ability.
The seven categories are Intermediate, Road Course, Super Speedway, Speedway, Concrete, Short Intermediate, and a dedicated Martinsville category. Change a single category score and the overall shifts to reflect it. That means editing a road course score affects the overall rating differently than editing a super speedway score would, because both categories carry their own weight in the final number.
Seven Track Types, One Overall Rating
Breaking NASCAR 26 driver ratings down by track type is the right design choice for a game that follows the Cup schedule. The Cup Series asks drivers to be multiple kinds of racer, and a single number for the full season can’t capture what makes each driver strong in specific situations. Daytona is drafting and pack positioning. Watkins Glen is commitment through technical corners and late braking. Bristol is momentum and late-race aggression. Because those things require different skills, bundling them into one number produces an average rather than a rating.
The seven categories cover everything the Cup schedule demands. Intermediates are the 1.5-mile ovals that make up the backbone of the schedule, tracks like Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Charlotte Motor Speedway, and Kansas Speedway. Road Courses cover Watkins Glen International, Circuit of the Americas, and the Chicago Street Course. Super Speedways mean Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway, where aerodynamics and drafting strategy matter more than raw lap pace. Speedways cover the 1-mile tracks like New Hampshire Motor Speedway and Phoenix Raceway. Concrete tracks like Bristol Motor Speedway and Nashville Superspeedway behave differently from standard asphalt and therefore earn their own slot. Short Intermediates sit between the mile-long speedways and the full 1.5-mile intermediates.
Martinsville gets its own dedicated category, and that decision is worth a moment. The 0.526-mile concrete oval at Martinsville Speedway has no real analog on the rest of the Cup schedule. It’s slower than the speedways, tighter than anything in its mileage range, and it produces a style of short-track racing that requires very specific skills to handle well. Forcing Martinsville into a “Speedway” or “Short Intermediate” bucket would blend its rating with tracks it has almost nothing in common with. Instead, a dedicated slot gives every driver an honest score at the track that routinely produces the most unusual results of the season.
Van Gisbergen received a 99 for Road Course in the video, and his Trackhouse teammates backed it up with his record. He has eight NASCAR Cup wins on road courses, tying him with Tony Stewart for second all-time. However, if you think that 99 should be a 96 or lower, the system lets you make that call and reflect it in your game.
What Editable NASCAR 26 Driver Ratings Mean for Players
The most direct use case is accuracy. Sports game ratings become debates from launch day forward, and the ability to fix whatever you disagree with is one of those quality-of-life features that sounds minor until you’ve played 40 hours of Career Mode wishing a specific driver were rated differently. You can correct it without waiting for a patch, without relying on community mods, and without any workaround. You just change the number.
Beyond corrections, the feature opens up scenarios that sports game fans have been constructing workarounds to achieve for years. For example, you can build a hypothetical roster that reflects a specific moment in NASCAR history, or adjust ratings to match your own read on the current season rather than how Motorsport Games assessed it at launch. A driver on a hot streak at road courses can get a Road Course bump regardless of when the game released. A driver who has historically struggled at Talladega can have that reflected in their Super Speedway score instead of being pulled toward the average.
The track-type breakdown also changes how the system works conceptually. A driver rated 90 overall is no longer just a 90 everywhere. They might be a 95 at Intermediates and a 72 on Road Courses, or a 70 at Super Speedways and an 88 on Concrete. Building a career field or a custom roster around those distinctions is a meaningfully different exercise than sorting everyone by one number, and it leads to a more interesting game.
The one open question is Career Mode. As of the Trackhouse reveal, Motorsport Games hasn’t confirmed whether rating editing will be available inside the main Career Mode or restricted to other modes. That distinction matters. A standalone roster editor before you start a career is useful, but the same tools inside an active save would let you keep ratings current as the real season progresses. You could adjust a driver mid-career to reflect a hot streak, a slump, or a team change, rather than living with the launch-day scores through 30 or 40 hours of progress. Without Career Mode support, you’re working with a more limited version of what the feature could be. Motorsport Games hasn’t confirmed either way yet.
Even with that question still open, what’s confirmed is further than any NASCAR console game has gone with driver customization. Seven track-type categories per driver, all editable, all feeding into an overall that reflects every change. It shifts the conversation about launch-day ratings from “this is what we’re stuck with” to “this is a starting point.”
NASCAR 26 releases September 18, 2026 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam. Gold Edition pre-orders get three days of early access starting September 15.
