Following a year of delay, the new introduced Next Gen car is finally running in the NASCAR Cup Series this 2022 season.
Next-Gen cars came onto the scene with some revolutionary changes in 2022, the main objective was to make racing tougher and more competitive.
The way Next-Gen cars have been manufactured is more convenient for road Courses which has impacted their final racing product on tracks, primarily the intermediate ones.
Denny Hamlin raises his concern pertaining to Dale Earnhardt Jr. team JRM Cup Series entry
NASCAR’s most popular driver Chase Elliott in a recent interview via The Athletic has expressed his concerns regarding the inflexibility of NASCAR in not making any crucial changes and how it can major affect the future.
“What’s concerning to me is I don’t want the industry to be so set in this Next Gen car and how it sits currently — I don’t want the people who designed it, who came up with it, to get so hard-headed and set in their ways to not be willing to make changes and better our racing at these different tracks. Because this is a learning process, and I think you have to be willing to change this thing a little bit as time goes on, to put on the best racing product we can,” Said Chase Elliott.
“It concerns me we’re going to get to a point of, ‘This is the way we designed it, we’re gonna make this work.’ And we’re going to end up swallowing our pride because we want to push this thing really, really hard and not be willing to adapt and make changes to put on a really good race at each track we go to,” he added.
Elliott indicates that in order for a satisfactory racing commodity NASCAR should be willing to change how the car behaves on certain tracks.
How does sequential shifting work?@SteveLetarte explains the change from last year to the Next Gen car. #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/O5Kf8Crd6j
— NASCAR on NBC (@NASCARonNBC) July 2, 2022
“Because it has been really a tale of two cars from some of the racetracks we’ve been to, to others. We’ve had some good races and we’ve had some horrendous races this year, frankly, and I just think we have to be careful that we’re not too hard-headed to be willing to adapt and better our shows,” Chase Elliott concluded.
Denny Hamlin, speaking about Next Gen safety issues and the Atlanta reconfiguration, explains why there needs to be more collaboration between the drivers, tracks and NASCAR. pic.twitter.com/KSLZYsLdkh
— Bob Pockrass (@bobpockrass) July 11, 2021
Late last year JGR driver Denny Hamlin didn’t hold back his opinions when addressing the Next-Gen car’s potential safety issues and NASCAR’s lack of transparency in addressing those concerns.
It appears to me that NASCAR is moving toward combining NASCAR with IMSA which it also owns.
Nascar should listen to the drivers, it is the drivers who have made this sport, without them there would be no Racing,!!!!