The two most recent NASCAR Cup Series races, at Watkins Glen and Bristol, is frustrating an entire industry but did so in two radically different ways.
Broken down atomically, the former was too eventful by the finish and the latter was not eventful enough and everyone seems to place the root cause at the backwards way NASCAR designed the current generation race car.
To be fair, the car has achieved some of its goals, significantly improving the on-track product on intermediate tracks while also narrowing the gap between the most and least successful teams.
But those gains on intermediates have come at the expense of short tracks and road courses, which is where those two most recent races took place.
Much of the discourse on NASCAR Twitter on Thursday centered around what happened, and what didn’t happen, on Saturday in the Bristol Night Race. It wasn’t so much that Kyle Larson led 462 of 500 laps, 92 percent of the race, but that not a great deal happened behind him either.
The tire degradation from the spring race that NASCAR and Goodyear tried to replicate never materialized so a layer of PJ1 Trackbite was applied to the bottom groove to prevent the race from become a single-file train against the wall.
It was successful from that regard but there were no real crashes, fender rubbing or paint-trading like those who come to Bristol every year expect and that was ultimately what the conversation was about on Thursday.
Fans targeted Goodyear for not reproducing the conditions from March but that was immediately rejected by numerous competitors who wanted fans to understand that this is still fundamentally a car conversation.
“There are so many people in the industry that see a car lead 462 laps and they automatically think it’s a terrible race,” Larson said on SiriusXM earlier in the week. “They say ‘there’s no tire wear, there’s no this, no that, blah, blah, blah.’
“There has never been tire wear at Bristol besides one race in the last 10 years, so it’s like everybody forgets about the past. Everyone wants to blame Goodyear, and everyone’s got the answers and what not. Nobody has the answers. Goodyear doesn’t have the answer. NASCAR doesn’t have the answer about their car and why it doesn’t run good in traffic. Us, the drivers, the teams and engineers — we don’t have the answers either. It’s hard to have opinions and hard when you don’t have the facts to back anything up.
“So, it’s just frustrating and it’s not like I’m defending our dominating run. I’m just, in a way, trying to defend our sport and defend Goodyear because they get such a bad rap every week like they’re the problem of why our racing sucks. It’s not them.”
He followed it up with a tweet, too.
Bristol, which doesn’t even feature NASCAR’s short track package on this car for what it’s worth, was reflective of a larger issue in which the NextGen just cannot consistently produce compelling short track races.
The events that receive the least fanfare right now are the likes of Richmond, which just lost a date to Mexico City, Martinsville, North Wilkesboro and Bristol and those are the races nearest to Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s heart.
“This cannot be okay,” Earnhardt said on his latest Dale Jr Download podcast episode. “I feel pretty confident that NASCAR is looking at this and saying the same thing. I do not see short track racing surviving this, if they don’t find some solution. And it’s not out of the question to think that in just a few years the Martinsville and the Bristols are going to be really hanging on.”
Chris Gabehart, who crew chiefs the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 for Denny Hamlin said expectations are often unreasonable, a sentiment that generated valuable conversation between himself and Earnhardt.
“All the doom and gloom is a little thick and aids in perpetuating the problem,” Gabehart wrote. “Could it be “better?” Yes. Has it been “bad” by a lot of validated eye test metrics of the past? No, not really. Does our society sensationalize nearly everything now? Yes. That’s not helping either.”
Earnhardt and Gabehart were referencing this interview after the race in which the crew chief said this car is too easy to drive compared to its predecessor:
When the NextGen is not producing short track races where a trailing car cannot follow the leader, it is also producing road course and even some larger oval races like Nashville that devolve into green-white-checkers chaos.
And while the playoff format encourages such a breakdown in traditional racing ethics, this car certainly does too because it’s too durable. It encourages drivers to slam into each other because its aerodynamic and mechanical grip properties are not allowing them to race.
That’s basically how Chase Elliott puts it.
“I mean you have a car that’s extremely durable, particularly with the front and rear bumpers, right,” Elliott said. “We haven’t had that historically you know. Typically, if you hit somebody hard enough, you were going to end up hurting your nose worse than you hurt their rear bumpers and that’s not how it is anymore.”
That’s in addition to a parity issue that Elliott has warned about for three years.
Yeah, absolutely,” Elliott said. “The more we’re the same, the less ways there are to be different, all it does is continue to highlight the little details or doing something behind the wheel to make a difference on any given Sunday.”
Further, Elliott says this is the product that NASCAR executives thought they wanted, cars that were extremely identical that encourages wrecking over passing.
“I don’t know what you do about that,” Elliott said. “I think at the end of the day, I think our sanctioning body loves it. I think they love it and they make the rules. So, odds are, I’d say, we’re going to keep crashing.”
To the point Earnhardt has made, Hamlin also thinks NASCAR cares about the racing product, especially on short tracks.
“There are certainly rules that they are continuing to look at over how to make short tracks better and really putting an emphasis over the last year on the tire,” Hamlin said. “We definitely saw something in the right direction at Watkins Glen and some of the other short tracks.
“I’m really excited to see what happens at Martinsville with that tire. I think we are trending in a direction that we used to race at decades ago, to age myself, but still the parts and pieces are all the same, it is going to put it in the drivers hands to go out (like Watkins Glen) and differentiate yourself.”
So, what now?
Well, the NASCAR industry is in the same place the entire industry has been at for three years. Everyone says the car is too underpowered for its weight, is too negatively affected by its completely sealed underbody and makes too much grip through its tires with a tremendously wide contact patch.
Ryan Bergentry, crew chief for Todd Gilliland and the Front Row Motorsports No. 38 advocated for the total overhaul of the underbody and engine regulations.
Bergentry tagged Hamlin, who co-owns 23XI Racing with Michael Jordan, because he has been very vocal about how much the cars cost, and how much needs to be done to improve the car, even once advocating for a complete redesign.
He has since backed off the latter, even arguing this week that it’s just not a viable solution.
“Me, as a car owner, I do not want to buy any more parts or pieces for this Next Gen car. We already have a tough enough time keeping up with all the changes that we’ve had to do to this thing,” Hamlin said on his podcast this week. “I said years ago we’ve just gotta design a Next Gen 2.0. Take that off the record because it’s just going to be way too expensive. We just didn’t do a great job with design from the get-go and this is what we got.”
NASCAR has been perpetually unwilling to open up the engines for a decade now. The Cup Series is still using powerplants that made over 900 horsepower as recently as 2015 but has seen tapered spacers placed on it that reduces the overall output.
The argument behind that decision is cost containment, with the industry being skeptical of every argument NASCAR makes, with some like Hamlin suggesting that the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of maintaining the status quo.
Cliff Daniels, who crews the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5, said the biggest challenge with this car is that it was built backwards from its predecessor.
It’s the entire reason clean air is such an advantage for a leading car over a trailing car, especially on short tracks, but really anywhere.
Hamlin has made this argument before too.
“We’re in such a weird spot where the leader has such an advantage on that track because he’s got the clean air,” Hamlin said. “You can run so much faster when you have the clean air. And we all know these Next Gen cars are terrible in traffic. They’re the worst cars in NASCAR in traffic. So when we designed them we designed a car that is worse than it’s ever been in traffic.”
But Daniels also ended his part of the discourse with hope that eventually solutions will be found to reach the intended racing product across every track type, and not just the 1.5-mile intermediates, which is the case right now.