2004 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series
56th season of NASCAR stock-car racing
The 2004 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series was the 56th season of NASCAR Nextel Cup Series in the United States and the 33rd modern-era Cup series season. The season began on Saturday, February 7, and ended on Sunday, November 21. Kurt Busch, who drove a Ford for Roush Racing, was the Nextel Cup champion.
This was the first season that NASCAR utilized the Chase for the Nextel Cup format that began with the Sylvania 300 on Sunday, September 19. Under the format rules, the top 10 drivers (and any additional drivers within 400 points of the leader) by the end of the 26th race would be eligible to compete in a final 10-race playoff to determine the NASCAR Nextel Cup champion. Following the 26th race, the eligible drivers would have their points reset to bring the drivers closer together in the standings, with only five points separating each driver. The season would then continue as normal, with the driver with the most points at the end of the season becoming the champion.
The NASCAR Manufacturers' Championship was won by Chevrolet when they captured 26 wins and 266 points. Ford finished in second place with 10 wins, and 224 points, while Dodge followed in third with 4 wins and 194 points.
This was the first year for the new series sponsorship.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “2004 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series” as 56th season of NASCAR stock-car racing. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as 56th season of NASCAR stock-car racing. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4603095. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “2004 NASCAR Nextel Cup Series” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.