Bill Elliott's NASCAR Challenge is a simulation of the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit, and thus operates like a racing game. The gameplay action was always through an in-car perspective. Players could chose to run single races at each track, or run for the season championship. The race distance was chosen by the player, which ranged from 10 miles to the realistic distance of 500 miles for the superspeedway races. In the MS-DOS version, the championship consisted of a visit to each of the eight tracks. In the NES and Game Boy versions, the season championship consisted of each of the four tracks run twice, for a total of eight races.