With each passing week, the NASCAR Cup Series ticks off another track and another challenge in the maiden season of its Next Gen car.
So far it’s seen mostly positive competition results at Daytona International Speedway (superspeedway), Auto Club Speedway (two-mile speedway) and Las Vegas Motor Speedway (1.5-mile intermediate oval).
Now comes Phoenix Raceway, the somewhat flat but fast one-mile track that sometimes is mistakenly referred to as a short track.
Aside from the exhibition race at the L.A Coliseum, Sunday’s race at Phoenix will be the first real test of in competition of the Next Gen car’s new brakes, which are bigger than what the previous generation of car had. Teams will put them to the test over 312 laps.
Luckily for many teams, this won’t be their first time visiting Phoenix with the new car. NASCAR held an organizational test there the week before the Busch Clash.
“I feel like, with the test that we had here last month, that’s gonna help a lot because most of us got an opportunity to feel things out and get our cars close and have at least some targets for simulation and all those things,” Front Row Motorsports’ Michael McDowell said Wednesday. “So this weekend should go a little bit smoother than the last two, but for us it’s just cleaning up some of the details that we had some issues with the last two weeks.”
Martin Truex Jr. said his team learned “a ton” from the test.
“Hopefully, gives us an idea of what we need to bring back,” Truex said in a media release. “That was our first time on a smaller, flatter track in these cars, so we really went to work on trying as many things as possible that we can use and build on throughout the year.”
As for the how the car’s brakes will perform, McDowell considers Phoenix a “light test” compared to what’s coming up soon at short tracks.
“You weren’t using them like you would at a road course or like you would at a Martinsville or a Richmond or something like that,” McDowell said. “So I feel like this is kind of like easing into it. The brakes are much better on the Next Gen car — bigger, better cooling. I think the (wider) wheels help that a lot too. The tires in general and the wheels are running much cooler, but bigger brakes, more powerful brakes, so I think that this will be a good first test for it in a full race condition.”
It’s been five years since Phoenix’s layout was reconfigured.
What was once turn one is now turn three and vice versa.
The track’s famed dogleg on what’s now the frontstretch has created exciting restarts as cars spread out in order to grab as many positions as possible.
“Restarts are the biggest change at Phoenix,” said Christopher Bell in a media release. “Understanding when to cut the dog leg, when not to cut the dog let, how much of an advantage it is to do that, and then trying to get back up on the race track for turn one, has really opened up the restarts.”
Kevin Harvick has won at Phoenix nine times in his Cup career, but not since the reconfiguration. But he hasn’t failed to finish inside the top 10 in that time.
“You just have to be aware of where you are on the racetrack, and it depends on which guy you are,” Harvick said in a media release of the restarts. “If you’re the guy on old tires, new tires, inside, outside, you kind of have to have a plan before you get to the corner as far as what you want to accomplish. If you accomplish it, that’s fine, but if you don’t, then you immediately have to go into damage control, where you go on defense to try and be used up as little as possible.
“You can easily wind up in a bad spot in the middle, four-wide, because it funnels down pretty quickly off of turn two. There’s a wall that you come up on to the straightaway, and then everybody’s funneling from four-wide to at least three-wide. There are a lot of different angles of attack that happen, so you just have to be aware of your situation.”