Explaining NASCAR’s new Next Gen car and how it’s forcing drivers, teams to be ‘a student of the sport’

Explaining NASCAR’s new Next Gen car and how it’s forcing drivers, teams to be ‘a student of the sport’

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Retooled, revamped and with a new sound, NASCAR’s Next Gen car is about to make it’s official debut. As NASCAR likes to say, it’s a brand new car; only the steering wheel and driver’s seat stuck around.

Although the Next Gen car — the seventh generation of a NASCAR stock car — is the latest version, it will transport NASCAR fans back to an era when the cars on track more closely resemble what consumers buy at dealerships. And that’s because the sport is “returning back to stock car roots,” said Brandon Thomas, NASCAR’s managing director for vehicle systems.

That resemblance is one of many eye-catching differences fans will notice when the Next Gen car makes its official debut with the start of the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season at the Daytona 500 on Feb. 20 — a year delayed because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Teams and drivers will spend at least the early part of the season, if not the whole thing, navigating through the challenges of competing with a new vehicle.

“You change the way you race, you change the way you approach a race,” said Joey Logano, the 2018 NASCAR champion who drives the No. 22 Ford for Team Penske. “The strategy, your pit stops, the way you set up the car, the way we practice is now going to be different. … You just have to be a student of the sport.”

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A level playing field?

Beginning in 2019, the car’s development was a collaboration with NASCAR, its manufacturers (Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota) and its teams and drivers to not only resemble its street-car counterparts but also to “reset everything from a competitive landscape,” adjust the business model and improve the quality of racing, Thomas said.

That begins with every piece of the car, aside from the engine, coming from single sources. Teams aren’t making parts in their shops anymore; they’re all buying the same parts from the same vendors. The brakes, driveshaft, greenhouse, tailpipes and on and on.

So everything underneath the body will be the same across manufacturers — again, save for the engine. But the design of each car was left up to the three manufacturers before getting NASCAR’s approval, which included wind-testing for parity among them.

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“That’s going to present a huge opportunity for drivers, teams, the crew chiefs and the engineers to really step up to the plate, get creative [and] come up with something that suits their driver,” said Tyler Reddick, the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet driver.

Reddick added that although more evenness across the board may have been the intention, “in some cases, it’s going to have the opposite effect.”

Echoing that sentiment, Denny Hamlin — who drives the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota and co-owns 23XI Racing — said to “temper expectations” on the Next Gen car being an equalizer.

“The quote of a ‘level playing field’ is grossly probably overused,” Hamlin said during a press conference Wednesday. “Certainly, maybe, a tighter box from front to back.”

Although teams will start with a legal car with the same parts instead of a blank slate, those with superior talent still have the potential to build better cars. But single-sourced parts shift the emphasis to competition, away from basic and foundational engineering.

The business model shift should help teams save money, NASCAR said, but without financial transparency from it and its teams, it’s unclear if they will actually spend less or shift where and how that money is spent. It doesn’t necessarily mean low-budget teams will be able to catch up to those big-budget ones, just that those with more money now have the chance to spend it elsewhere.

“They still feature smart crew chiefs, smart race engineers, smart R&D groups and really savvy race teams, and we want them to still shine,” Thomas said. “It’s just that a lot of their effort now is going towards sharpening their own aero, as opposed to having to construct it from the start.”

A concern with teams buying their car parts is they’re affected by ongoing global supply chain issues, translating, for example, to not every team having a backup car for the Daytona 500, which is an anomaly.

NASCAR hoped each individual team would have five cars ready to go at the start of the season, but as of mid-January, some teams only had two cars built, FOX Sports reported. A shortage in parts could lead to a shortage in cars, meaning drivers will have to be extra careful not to crash or have to go to a backup car.

“Right now, we don’t see any parts or pieces that are going to keep any car from racing in an event,” NASCAR’s senior vice president of racing innovation, John Probst, said last month. “We’re working with the teams to make sure we’re implementing backup cars in an efficient manner. … Time will tell. But right now, we’re concerned, but we’re not in a situation where folks aren’t going to be able to race.”

New look, new sounds

Most obvious are the superficial differences between the previous cars and the Next Gen edition.

Specifically, the number placement is forward instead of centered, allowing more space for sponsors’ logos. The wheels are also larger — now an 18-inch aluminum wheel versus the previous 15-inch steel wheel — and the number of lugnuts has been reduced from five to one.

Then there’s the shape of the car. All three Cup Series cars — the Chevrolets, Fords and Toyotas — have a coupe-style now and are up to six inches shorter than the previous version.

“They hit a home run,” Kyle Busch, the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota driver, said about the car’s look. “I think there’s some elements of it that we could have tweaked on a little bit, just from personal taste, but I think everybody has their own personal tastes. But nine out of 10. … In my opinion, the COT [Car of Tomorrow, 2007-2012] was not all that nice to look at. But this Next Gen car, I feel like they hit it way closer.”

The body is completely symmetrical — whereas the right side of the Gen 6 car was about two inches longer than the left — and that has significant aerodynamics implications. The symmetry noticeably reduces the amount of sideforce, so the cars won’t be as stable through corners, increasing the chance of spins and accidents while opening the door for a better-handling car to pass.

“Everything is much more modern,” Tyler Reddick, the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet driver, said. “So I just have to retrain my senses and where my limits are as a driver and feeling the car, and so that’s going to be very challenging.”

With the raised splitter in the front of the car, much of the downforce is eliminated, making it harder to drive, which should highlight the drivers’ skillsets and put much of the control back in their hands. But whether these aerodynamics changes will enhance the quality of competition, hold the status quo or create too much chaos on the track remains to be seen, obviously.

“From that lack of downforce that we have, you’re gonna see a lot more action, hopefully, on the track,” said Bubba Wallace, driver of the No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota. “Trying to pass somebody will be a little bit different, a bit more difficult just because you are on edge.”

Moving away from sheet metal, the body is now made from a more durable composite material, which aims to lessen the negative effects of “beating and banging” on the track.

Looks aside, there are several less-than-obvious updates. A big one is the chassis itself.

When Austin Dillon crashed during a Next Gen test at Charlotte Motor Speedway in November, his team was able to repair the car and get back on the track the same day, which likely wouldn’t have been possible with the previous car.

Instead of the chassis all being welded together, the Next Gen’s version is in three pieces: a front and rear clip that are bolted to the center section. So after Dillon’s crash, his team, Richard Childress Racing, was able to remove the damaged front clip and bolt on a replacement instead of possibly having to scrap the whole car.

Another new element of the Next Gen car is an underwing, a series of panels underneath the car to make a single flat surface to help with aerodynamics and increase stability in traffic.

Though the underwing isn’t visible when cars are on the track, it’s one of many contributing factors to the noticeably different sounds the Next Gen car produces, along with the shape of the car, its roofline and pushing the floor of the car down farther, which eliminated exhaust running under there, Thomas said. The car sound is now deeper and throatier.

“The exhaust now is going to route down each side of the vehicle,” Thomas said. “So that just dictated a complete split exhaust, which gives it a completely different sound. … Now, you’re hearing the individual cylinders a bit more. The exhaust sounds a lot more like a street car exhaust you would hear, but louder, obviously.”

Simulations and robot crash tests

Unlike the rest of the car, when it comes to safety, NASCAR makes necessary improvements in real time after a bad accident, like after Ryan Newman’s crash during the 2020 Daytona 500. So all safety updates of the past — like moving the driver closer to the center of the car and moving door bars further away from the driver — have been incorporated into the new car, even if they’re not exactly identical, Thomas said.

And NASCAR’s efforts to improve safety remain ongoing, and “minor tweaks” were still made to the Next Gen roll cage based on data from Newman’s crash, he added.

Bumpers are also included on the car now secured to the front and rear of the chassis, making it the first thing that will hit on impact. They’re actual bumpers with foam attached to absorb the energy from a crash and lessen the impact on the driver.

To maximize safety, NASCAR also continued working with the University of Nebraska for crash testing. They conducted between 7,000 and 8,000 simulations, Thomas said, crashing the Next Gen car into a wall to make sure everything worked as designed. They also took two fully built cars to Talladega Superspeedway and had a robot crash them into a wall at 130 miles per hour, and that real-world crash testing validated what the simulation data told them.

“The things that we have researched and the testing we’ve done and just the conditions we put the car through are far more severe than what we see in the average on-track accident,” Thomas said. “So we feel like we’ve done our job. It’s never finished, obviously. But we feel like we’ve got a great starting spot in that regard.”