The Next-Gen Car Is Here
The last major overhaul to the Cup car came between four decades ago in 1981. The cars have become smaller, shorter, lighter and safer since then, but all of the main ingredients have stayed basically the same. This Next-Gen Car is a totally clean sheet of paper. As veteran crew chief and Fox reporter Larry McReynolds told me, “[The] only thing that’s the same is that you’ve still have a driver that’s bucked in the seat that’s going to be driving the race car.”
The aerodynamics are different, and the cars will look more like their road going counterparts. No more antiquated 4 speed H-pattern stick shift—manual transmission gears are now selected with a 5 speed sequential transaxle. The steering rack has been given a through makeover, no more steering box with pitman arms and tie rods. In its place is a rack similar to the one you’d find on your road car. Only the engines are the same, still a 5.86L naturally-aspirated. With the updated aerodynamics and drag of the new car NASCAR had to play around with the horsepower to keep the speeds similar to what the car have run in the past.
In the past NASCAR teams made a majority of their own components to NASCAR specifications. Now everything is store bought from suppliers. All of the chassis come from one company, the rack and pinion steering rack comes from another, the brakes from another… and on and on. Teams no longer have to make anything except for the engines, where each manufacturer (Ford, Chevy, Toyota) has their own engine company that supplies their respective teams.
The ongoing philosophy is that this will help level the playing field, but McReynolds warns that as nice as that sounds, the cream will still rise to the top. “Maybe it closes the gap a little bit for little while, but talent and cubic dollars will prevail,” he said.
Even though 90 percent of the components on the car come from sole suppliers the teams still have a lot of adjustments they can do to make their cars quicker and handle better. Yes, the box of adjustments gets smaller with this car versus the old car, but there is still things for teams to do. Denny Hamlin’s crew chief Chris Gebhart said it best: “If on the old car there were 250 things I could adjust, on the new car it’s more like 125.”
But NASCAR is serious about limiting the “gray areas” in the rules and what teams can do. The series dropped a bomb this week with an announcement on strong penalties for technical rules infractions. As NASCAR chief racing development officer Steve O’Donnell put it to me, “It used to be ‘let’s see what we can get away with and go racing.’ That’s not the case with this car. We’ve built this car to try and make it as fundamentally sound as possible in collaboration with the teams and then really put it on teams, and drivers and pit crews to go out there and win races.”
Infractions range from L1, which includes post-race failure to meet minimum weight requirements and team source parts not meeting the NASCAR rules; to the most severe level L3 infractions for things such as counterfeiting or modifying single-source Next-Gen parts, engine infractions and performance enhancements. Penalties for a Level 3 violation can be as severe as a $500,000 fine, losing postseason eligibility regardless of wins and points, and team suspensions.
New Race Format
NASCAR is well aware of the risk of its grand Gen7 debut turning into a demolition derby; clearly, 40+ cars packed into a ¼ mile tack would look like the 405 freeway on a… well basically every day really. So it came up with a new format for the race.
Drivers will take to the track this afternoon for practice followed by single-car qualifying which will set the field for four separate heat races. Each of the four fastest qualifiers will be on the pole for each heat race. From there, the rest of the field for each heat race will be similarly filled using qualifying positions.