The series had carried the Nextel Cup name since 2004, when Nextel replaced R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company as title sponsor following the end of the long-running Winston Cup arrangement. When Sprint acquired Nextel in a 2005 merger, NASCAR and the combined Sprint Nextel corporation agreed to transition the series name beginning with the 2008 season. The Nextel Cup thus ran for four seasons (2004–2007) before becoming the Sprint Cup Series, which itself ran for nine seasons.
The Sprint Cup trophy was designed by Tiffany and Co. and crafted in silver, featuring a pair of checkered flags in flight.
The Chase for the Championship, introduced in 2004, underwent several significant revisions during the Sprint Cup era. From 2007 to 2010, all Chase drivers had their points reset to 5,000, plus ten bonus points for each race win during the regular season. From 2011 to 2013, the format was adjusted again: ten drivers with the most points automatically qualified for the Chase, joined by two wild-card entrants who were the highest-win drivers ranked between eleventh and twentieth in points. Their points were reset to 2,000, with three bonus points per regular-season win for automatic qualifiers.
The 2014 season brought the most sweeping Chase changes of the Sprint Cup era. The grid was expanded to as many as sixteen drivers, with fifteen of those spots reserved for race winners. The playoff was divided into four rounds — the Round of 16, Round of 12, Round of 8, and Championship 4 — with four drivers eliminated after each of the first three rounds. Any driver in the Chase who won a race in one of the first three rounds automatically advanced to the next round regardless of overall points standing. The Championship 4 finale placed the final four contenders at equal points entering the last race, with the championship awarded to whichever of those four drivers finished highest.
The Sprint Cup era coincided with a sustained decline in NASCAR's television ratings and track attendance from the peaks reached in the mid-2000s Nextel Cup years. By 2014, ratings had fallen considerably and attendance at many tracks had dropped by roughly fifteen percent. Critics attributed the decline partly to NASCAR's scheduling decisions, including the reduction of races at historic southeastern venues in favor of markets in other regions, and to growing competition from other sports entertainment options. Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank acquired Sprint in July 2013, which had no immediate effect on the sponsorship arrangement, but by 2016 the relationship had run its course.
The title sponsorship with Sprint concluded after the 2016 season. On December 1, 2016, NASCAR announced a new sponsorship agreement with Monster Energy, and on December 19 the series was renamed the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, with new series and NASCAR logos unveiled simultaneously. The Sprint Cup era thus ended after the 2016 season, having lasted nine years. Its Chase playoff structure, refined over that period, carried forward into subsequent naming eras and remains the basis of the current NASCAR Cup Series format.
The Sprint Cup era produced several championship runs that entered the sport's record books. Jimmie Johnson won the Sprint Cup championship in 2010, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, extending his unprecedented run of consecutive titles — which had begun with the 2006 Nextel Cup and 2007 Nextel Cup championships — and tying the all-time record of seven career championships shared with Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt. Johnson's five consecutive championships from 2006 to 2010 remain the record for the most consecutive Cup Series titles.