Even before the NASCAR Cup Series began utilizing the single source supplied NextGen car, Chase Elliott was waving a red flag urging the community to consider the perils of spec racing.
He said that passing in the previous generation car became an increasingly more challenging proposition because the tighter rule book kept teams in a tighter box. In short, the more cars are the same, the closer in speed they become, and the more procedural the races are.
That is especially true for tracks with just a single groove.
So now, four years into the NextGen era, that is the biggest competition element that NASCAR is having to address more often than not — especially as parity has given way to a hierarchy but with less passing overall.
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With that said, NASCAR is entertaining the idea of targeting certain areas of the car to allow for competition. League president Steve O’Donnell said as much during a conversation on the Dale Jr Download in October.
“We’re always open to changes,” O’Donnell said. “The one piece I really look at, and I think our group does, we have this car and some things contained from a cost standpoint but what does everyone really like?
“The ability to tweak on the car and find an advantage to do something cool. What’s the next iteration of that? Now that we have the parts and pieces long term, maybe we look at race teams are making some parts again, some things we can open up.
“We give it a cost cap where we can open it up. But we’ve at least stopped the wasteful spending and now we want to get it back to where an engineer can come in and tweak on a car or an OEM can say ‘this is our IP and we want to try something’ from a new technology standpoint. We’re open to tweaking on it. We had the mindset of needing to stop the bleeding so now what can we do to keep making the racing better?”
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