Next season in NASCAR will herald new changes with the Next Gen car and one of them will be pit strategies.
Unlike the current chassis, in the Next Gen car there will be only one lug nut instead of five. This will bring about changes in the activities in the pit stop as drivers try to gain an advantage over the stop.
However, that’s not the only place where 23XI Racing is trying to gain an advantage next season. Competition director Mike Wheeler said that he has already spoken to “top-five teams” in F1 to improve the performance of his team.
“I talked to people last January about this, knowing that Gen-7 was coming,” Wheeler told NBC Sports. “How F1 teams go have two teams. They work together, yet they have one core group on the station on pit lane calling the race.
“In practice, everyone has their own ideas, but they have a boss and one of them is a senior race engineer, who says ‘You are going to change the camber, and you are going to change toe, and you’re going to report back to us what it does.’ Everyone knows where everyone’s setup is supposed to start. Everyone knows where they’re headed for setup.”
It goes in line with what Denny Hamlin wanted when he said that his team wanted to set up more like F1 teams.
In their first season in NASCAR, they got the Cup win that they so desperately wanted. With the addition of Kurt Busch and the experience of a year in the Series, the team will be planning to come out strong in the upcoming season.