The early benefits and challenges of NASCAR's Next Gen car

NASCAR’s revolutionary Next Gen Cup Series car has had something of a baptism of fire, with last Sunday’s Daytona 500 on the 190mph high banks a world away from the LA Coliseum’s quarter-mile oval where the car made its debut earlier this month.

The new machine’s single-supplier, common-component ethos forms the seventh generation of stock car at the premier level since 1948 and comes at a time when cost savings need to be made. These outlier tracks have proved the concept’s flexibility; while teams will still assemble multiple cars for use on short tracks, intermediates and superspeedways – NASCAR’s punishing 36-round schedule means they need multiple cars in rotation in a logistical puzzle – they simply won’t build as many as before.

The Next Gen car is assembled in three pieces: the central chassis has front and rear ‘clips’ that are bolted on, which helps teams out when it comes to fixing inevitable accident damage. Another stated aim is to attract a fourth manufacturer to join Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota – and NASCAR will likely add a hybrid element to its V8 engines in 2024 to aid that.

What Next Gen has achieved already is to attract new teams to its charter franchise system: Kaulig Racing bought two charters to enter a pair of full-time cars, 23XI added a second car for Kurt Busch (buying its charter from StarCom Racing, which is now affiliated with Floyd Mayweather’s ‘The Money Team Racing’ project), GMS Racing bought in to Richard Petty Motorsports, and Trackhouse Racing bought Chip Ganassi Racing to field two cars.

Kaulig is the ‘poster boy’ team for Next Gen. Having shown race-winning and title-contending form in the second-tier Xfinity Series, it won a Cup race with road-course star AJ Allmendinger at Indianapolis last year during its toe-in-the-water campaign.

“I had a meeting 18 months ago with Richard Petty, and he was talking about when he raced years ago, they only had one car for all the race tracks,” says team owner Matt Kaulig. “When I got into this sport seven years ago, I was amazed to find they used a car for every speedway, you had to have 10 or more full-blown race cars in your garage ready to go for all the different kinds of track. If you think about it, that was really unnecessary – it was overkill.

Next Generation rules have allowed teams such as Kaulig to make the step up from Xfinity

Photo by: Rusty Jarrett / NKP / Motorsport Images

“The Next Gen car is a business model that NASCAR has introduced for reduced costs for the owners, and I feel it’s almost levelled the playing field for us. Of course, we don’t know how it will play out yet, but it just felt like a really good time, and a really good opportunity, for us to move up and see what we can do. Everyone is starting with a clean slate.”

Kaulig had the misfortune to suffer the biggest wreck in LA, when champion Kyle Larson veered its driver Justin Haley into the inside concrete wall, smashing the right-front wheel off the car. While not impacting on its Daytona programme, it means a knock-on as the series returns to California this weekend for Fontana.

"What we can’t do is ask a driver, once he pulls that visor down and gets ready to race in anger, to mitigate his performance based upon a concern about parts. That’s not racing"David Wilson

“It destroyed the front clip,” says Kaulig. “The neat thing about this Next Gen is that you can use the car. You can beat it up, and you just replace the front and rear clips depending on the damage. With Justin’s car, it’s put us behind a little bit. Getting out of that LA race unscathed means you have a car to work with, but our car got destroyed – and it destroyed a concrete wall! But Justin was fine, that’s the main thing.”

Another relatively new team owner, Denny Hamlin, was more critical of the damage one of his cars sustained, when Kurt Busch also got wrecked in the Coliseum.

“On the ownership side, all we think about is cost – when we look at our team’s net [finances], it was bad,” says Hamlin. “It was really, really bad because it was very expensive for us to go there and get significant damage. When you look at what we win versus what we pay out it just didn’t add up.”

Hamlin’s OEM boss, Toyota Racing’s David Wilson, is sympathetic to his team’s plight, especially as the common parts supply chain isn’t as robust as it should be.

“For the next few weeks it’s going to be tough on all of our teams,” he said at the weekend. “We’re going to have to be mindful and make good decisions.

Kaulig driver Haley was hooked into the wall in the Clash race and sustained heavy damage

Photo by: Lesley Ann Miller / Motorsport Images

“What we can’t do is ask a driver, once he pulls that visor down and gets ready to race in anger, to mitigate his performance based upon a concern about parts. That’s not racing, and we’re in the racing business. We’re all in this together, and we’re all doing the best we can. We know NASCAR and their supplier base are on it 24/7.”

Daytona’s 500 featured the usual levels of mayhem but, even though a lot of cars did get torn up, much of the damage on display in the garage afterwards looked replaceable – although Harrison Burton’s Ford did fly upside down at high speed.

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The increased flexibility engineered into these cars doesn’t mean anyone is at risk of missing races through a lack of cars or spare parts just yet. When Wilson asked Hamlin when he thought his team would be comfortable with its inventory, he replied “Phoenix” – he didn’t mean the upcoming race there in March, but the finale in November…

David Wilson, Group Vice President and President of TRD, U.S.A.

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images