Despite a great deal of progress over the past four years, the NextGen car remains a work in progress regarding how it races on short tracks and specifically one like Martinsville Speedway.
With each Goodyear tire softening effort, aerodynamic tweak or horsepower increase, the Sanctioning Body is still trying to reproduce something similar to what the Gen6 produced or even the O’Reilly Series package.
The five-year-old car is just a radically different ‘Stock Car’ than any that came before it. With its sealed underbody, wider profile tires and rear diffuser, it’s built closer to an IndyCar with a body over it than anything else.
As a result, it’s changed the way drivers approach a place like Martinsville and that’s to say nothing at all about how they now shift at each end of the track on practically every lap.
Is it at least getting directionally better? Chase Elliott believes so.
“Definitely,” Elliott said. “It seems better, for sure. At least we got into a spot the last couple trips where tires really made a big difference and definitely in the spring race, I mean it was a lot of time to come down pit road and put on a set of tires and you could see the guys that were going forward and the guys that were struggling and certainly inside the car, it got to a point where you really fell off a cliff and that’s how it should be.”
That’s certainly what happened during the first and final stages of the race on Sunday. Kyle Larson fell off the lead lap on a run-long strategy while Denny Hamlin came close. Only seven cars finished on the lead lap as the Cup Series went on its longest green flag run at the track since the fall race in 1987.
Elliott thinks the tire wear would be even more extreme without stages.
“If the race just played all the way through and you had people pitting and taking chances of coming down pit road to one stop or two stop or however they wanted to slice up the race and take a chance on the cautions falling or something would probably also be a really healthy thing, which I know is not going to happen,” Elliott said.
“But that was why that last stage got so entertaining, I thought was just because the stage length was long enough that you had a lot of chances to do something different. And to your point, the tire falling off enough gave us that opportunity to come in and make up the time difference you did for your stop.”
But really, when people say they miss old Martinsville, they mean the bump-and-run. They mean driving in deeper than a leading car and trying to beat them off the corner. Elliott says that’s just not possible with the NextGen.
“I mean honestly with this thing, it’s really hard to get close enough to hit somebody and not just totally ruin your corner,” Elliott said. “In my experience, the person that wins this race likely is not going to do that. They’re probably just going to be good enough to beat everybody else if I had to guess. …
“But yeah, just the way this thing races and stuff, which it’s a little better now with the tire and whatnot, but man, if I wanted to punt the guy in front of me and pass him, it is hard to get that close and just make up a big distance and hit him and deal with the impact of hitting him the wash and me ruining my own corner enough to do something good about it without just totally crashing it.”
Denny Hamlin says the NextGen is ‘miles ahead’ on short tracks from where it was in 2022 and that it’s mostly due to Goodyear’s contributions. The biggest challenge is one that he’s pointed to for years, and that is the inherent parity of this race car.
“It’s still difficult (to pass) and I don’t know, I just don’t think we’re ever going to get back to truly where it was because all the teams have gotten so much closer and the cars are all the same,” Hamlin said. “So as long as you have the cars the same, drivers can see how every driver drives and can copy that, eventually the margins are too small.
“And I think at this racetrack, truthfully, you need to be about two tenths faster per lap, faster than the car in front of you to overtake them. The field is just not strong. It’s just not separated by that much. That’s the difference between first and 20th. So, you need to have someone really off the pace and you really got to be good to make a nice clean pass or they’re going to have to give it to you.”
Hamlin also echoed a popular driver sentiment concerning this car at every track type – that it needs to be nose down and tail up rather than the other way around.
“I don’t know that we’re ever going to get it where we’d love to have it,” Hamlin said. “Certainly, a world where the nose of the car is lower, the back of the car is higher and that’s going to be better, but it’s not going to be light years better.”
Daniel Suarez said he wanted to see less shifting. It’s something Hamlin echoed during his Monday podcast with Dale Earnhardt Jr. too. That would require a completely redesigned gearing structure.
Chase Briscoe only made a handful of Martinsville starts with the old car and said he misses those days.
“It’s vastly different and it was a lot of fun back then,” Briscoe said. “We would be sliding the tires so much and spinning the tires. That is what I remember most about watching races here as a kid. So, I don’t know. We’re not really doing that now and we still have a long way to go for sure.”
Watch: Race Rewind: Byron reprises fall win at Martinsville
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