Kyle Larson sat on top of the practice board on Friday afternoon at Dover Motor Speedway, but it is Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin who heads into Sunday's NASCAR All-Star Race as the betting favourite for the $1 million pay-out in the event's first running on the Monster Mile.
FOX Sports led its Friday All-Star wrap with the line that Hamlin was the bookmakers' headline number, off the back of two top-three Cup finishes in 2026 and a Dover record that includes three top-fives in the last five points races at the concrete mile. Practice told a slightly different story. Larson – the 2021 Cup champion and the man whose double-duty Coca-Cola 600 calendar entry has been the subject of repeated debate – set the fastest single-lap time in Friday's All-Star practice in his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. RACER's recap of the session ran the headline "Larson leads All-Star practice at Dover" and noted that the No. 5 car was the only Cup entry to break into the upper end of the speed chart on consecutive runs.
The storyline that has dominated build-up week is the move from North Wilkesboro, where the All-Star Race has run for the past three seasons, to Dover. NASCAR positioned the relocation as a freshen-up after two relatively uneventful editions of the short-track meeting and as a way to load the Memorial Day weekend slot ahead of the Coca-Cola 600. The fan reaction has been the opposite of universally positive – the lap-down reset rule and revised heat-format have already drawn criticism in the week, with NASCAR's own social channels carrying a small but vocal stream of negative comments – but inside the garage the move has been read more pragmatically.
Chase Elliott summed up that mood in an interview with NBC Sports posted on Friday afternoon, describing the All-Star Race at Dover as "a normal weekend" because the Cup Series had only just been on the same surface several weeks earlier. The 2020 Cup champion went on to suggest that the proximity to the regular Dover Cup race in May removes much of the novelty that the All-Star Race usually trades on, but said his Hendrick crew has approached the meeting like any other 400-lap concrete event rather than a one-off show.
Hendrick Motorsports' own statistical preview, published earlier in the week, framed Larson, Elliott, William Byron and Alex Bowman as four of the half dozen most credible winners by recent Dover average finish, with each of the four sitting inside the top eight in average finish at the track over the last three seasons. NASCAR's own All-Star eligibility lock-in already covers Larson and Hamlin – both as previous All-Star winners – along with Elliott, Byron, Bowman, Chase Briscoe, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney and Kyle Busch, with the rest of the field set to be filled through Saturday's heat races and fan vote.
The revised All-Star format introduces a 250-lap main event split into two stages of 100 and 150 laps, with a lap-down reset between the first and second halves, a competition caution roughly two-thirds of the way through, and the open-pit pass-through rule from the All-Star Open feeding through to the main race. The pay-out remains $1 million to the winner; the format penalties for pit-road infractions are heavier than at a regular Cup race.
With practice in the books and qualifying scheduled for Saturday, Sunday's All-Star main is set to start in front of a sell-out grandstand. The Hendrick contingent appears the most consistent over a full Dover run, but Hamlin – who in 2026 has stacked four top-tens, two top-fives and one win on his way to second in the regular-season standings – is the most logical points-day-form pick on what is the biggest single non-Cup payout of the season.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/hamlin-favourite-larson-practice-nascar-all-star-dover-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
