DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – NASCAR has taken an additional step towards strengthening the identities of the NASCAR Xfinity Series and the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series by updating the owner championship guidelines for both series ahead of the 2019 season.

Starting next year, team owners in the Xfinity Series will only earn postseason benefits – playoff points and automatic playoff berths via race wins – for the owners championship if the driver earns points in the Xfinity Series or in the Truck Series.

Meanwhile, a Truck Series owner will only earn those postseason benefits for the owner playoffs if the driver earns Truck Series points.

The rules change is meant as an incentive for Xfinity and Truck Series team owners to field series regulars in their respective divisions.

“It’s important to note that we didn’t discourage that the other way,” said John Bobo, NASCAR vice president of racing operations. “We want teams and owners to hire drivers from lower series and give them an opportunity in the higher series.

“When we got our driver participation rules this last season, I think we felt it was a pretty good mix, but we continue to look at that and creating the type of balance that we need, so we’re really curious to see how this rule impacts that and we’ll be really curious to see what it does. We also think that it presents something really important, which is as we go into the playoffs, we don’t want an Xfinity team owner or a Truck team owner to hire Cup drivers to come in and win them additional points for the playoffs.”

Currently, Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series drivers who win a race in the Xfinity Series or the Truck Series score playoff points for the team they are driving for and those wins count towards the team’s playoff eligibility and standing on the playoff grid.

For an example, this season Brad Keselowski, Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney have combined to earn an Xfinity Series-leading five wins for the No. 22 Team Penske Ford team, which also leads the regular-season and provisional playoff standings in the division and is locked into the owners’ playoffs by virtue of those five victories.

Next season, the five wins earned would not give the No. 22 team an automatic bid into the playoffs, nor would any of the playoff points they’ve banked with their Cup Series drivers count towards their postseason bank.

Any team electing to field Cup Series drivers can still make the owners playoff on regular season points next year; they will just lack the incentives that those Cup Series drivers would have earned in previous seasons.

If this season’s standings were put under the 2019 rules, the Nos. 22, 18 and 42 teams would still advance to the postseason by points.

However, the No. 3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet, which won with Austin Dillon in a rain-shortened event at Michigan Int’l Speedway in June and sits 14th in regular season points this year, would not make the playoffs under that same scenario in 2019.

Thursday’s move comes after NASCAR previously established more defined participation guidelines for both the NASCAR Xfinity Series and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series ahead of this season.

Those guidelines set limits on how many races a Cup Series regular could run in each series and barred them from the Xfinity Series Dash 4 Cash events, as well as the regular-season finale and the playoff races in both divisions.

This year, Cup Series regulars could compete in a maximum of seven Xfinity Series and five Truck Series races during the regular season.