Every new racing season brings hope.
This year, that hope might be stronger than ever.
The reason is the Next Gen race car that will debut in the NASCAR Cup Series today.
As the Next Gen car entered its final testing phase late last year, SPEED SPORT spoke with team owners, crew chiefs and others about what the Next Gen car represents to them.
More often than not, opportunity was the common theme.
The opportunity to save money. The opportunity to be a little more competitive. Plus, the opportunity to finally compete in NASCAR’s premier series.
Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:
Competition
What does B.J. McLeod think of when he hears the words “Next Gen car?”
“Opportunity, it’s that simple,” McLeod told SPEED SPORT.
McLeod enters his second season as co-owner of Live Fast Motorsports, which fields the No. 78 car.
“It makes the box a lot smaller that we have to figure out to improve our program,” McLeod said. “We’ll have the same transaxle that the top-five teams have. We’ll have the same steering rack, the same spindles, hubs … the majority of the car, we will have a top-five piece of equipment, just that simple.”
In 2021, the No. 78 car had one top-10 finish — a ninth-place run in the regular-season finale at Daytona Int’l Speedway. Outside of that, Live Fast Motorsports never finished better than 22nd (Texas). It finished on the lead lap eight times in 36 races, but only one of those results was at a non-superspeedway or road course (Pocono Raceway).
However, even with a smaller box to work with, McLeod recognizes the opportunity presented to Live Fast by Next Gen is different than others. But it’s an opportunity that could be good for driver and team morale.
“We’re looking to be a 30th-place team, half the amount of laps down that we are right now on a mile-and-a-half track,” said McLeod, who hates being about nine laps down at the end of those races. “It just really does beat you down week after week after week.”
With the Next Gen car, McLeod believes “that without a doubt, we’ll cut 50 percent of that out because of the box we’ve been put in with this Next Gen car from front to back of the field.”
McLeod made that statement before NASCAR announced it would switch from its initial 550-horsepower package for 1.5-mile tracks to a 670-horsepower, four-inch spoiler package across all tracks except superspeedways.
Brad Daugherty, the co-owner of another one-car team in JTG Daugherty Racing, believes the argument that Next Gen will make competition closer is “a little bit overstated.”
“At the end of the day, Joe Gibbs, Rick Hendrick, Roger Penske, those guys, it’ll be an arms race,” Daugherty said. “They’ll have unlimited resources to do so. Early on, I think you’ll see teams like mine and a couple of other teams have a chance to run well. … They have every advantage, whether it be on the race track, off the race track. … Maybe we can save money with these race cars. I’m just looking at it from a business standpoint. …
“The reality is at the end of the day, you’re gonna have to outrun those four big cornerstone teams. That’s gonna be hard to do. But we’ll show up and give it a shot.”
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