NASCAR’s Next Gen car reaches the crossroads for short-track racing (2025)

Six years ago, NASCAR short-track racing was so popular that the rapid-reaction sports apparel company Breaking T came up with a “More Short Tracks” shirt. The merch was reflective of the widely-held sentiment NASCAR should increase the number of short tracks on the schedule, because they consistently offered the best racing at the time.

It’s doubtful anyone is buying that shirt these days. Short-track racing has taken a major hit since NASCAR’s “Next Gen” car arrived three years ago, while the intermediate tracks (such as this weekend’s race at Kansas Speedway) have seen by far the best racing in their history.

Ideally, there wouldn’t be a tradeoff. The four primary types of NASCAR circuits — short tracks, intermediates, road courses and superspeedways — would each have great racing in a perfect world. But of all areas to take a hit, few could have imagined short tracks — the lifeblood of NASCAR’s grassroots and the foundation of its history — would be the ones to suffer when the Next Gen car arrived at the start of 2022.

Now that the vehicle is nearing the end of its third full season, with few obvious answers on the horizon, it’s increasingly sinking in that this might just be the short-track product for the foreseeable future. And that’s scary to some of short-track racing’s biggest advocates.

“I do not see short track racing surviving this if they don’t find some solution,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said on his “Dale Jr. Download” podcast this week. “We lost one Richmond (race) and it’s not out of the question to think in just a few years, the Martinsvilles and the Bristols are going to be really hanging by a thread to keep their two races.”

Earnhardt, who once posted a picture of himself celebrating Independence Day by wearing one of those “More Short Tracks” shirts, said he felt an urgency for NASCAR to address the issues. Officials should quickly gather a variety of voices in a room behind closed doors, he said, and figure out what it would take to “entirely overhaul” the Next Gen car for short-track races.

“How much time do we have in the bank before we are bankrupt with our fans (regarding) short-track racing?” Earnhardt said.

But it’s doubtful there’s even much of an appetite to make changes to the car at this point. On his “Actions Detrimental” podcast this week, driver/co-owner Denny Hamlin said he was now backtracking on the concept of a “Next Gen 2.0” because teams cannot afford to buy new parts and pieces.

And even if NASCAR wanted to design an entirely new car (going beyond whatever can be done to the current model), it would take years of work before it ever hit the track. So it seems like the Next Gen is here to stay, at least through the end of the decade.

“This thought process of ‘We’re just going to get rid of a billion dollars’ worth of race cars and start over’ — that’s complete b—s—,” former driver Kenny Wallace said in a social media video this week. “That ain’t never going to happen. That’s stupid talk.”

What’s frustrating for many in the industry is this conversation around short tracks is not new. When the Next Gen debuted, it immediately performed poorly on that type of circuit (typically classified as 1 mile and under). Drivers found it difficult to even get close to one another — let alone pass. So NASCAR went to work on changes it could make to the car’s aerodynamic elements, implementing a variety of tweaks and adjustments (including another batch heading into 2024).

But nothing has seemed to make much of a dent and, by April, it was clear that continuing to work on the car’s aerodynamics was not a short-term solution.

“The bottom line is it doesn’t move the needle and the drivers will tell you that,” said Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, in a SiriusXM interview this spring. “So there is no need for us to put a lot of energy towards that type of testing.”

Many drivers have called for NASCAR to increase the horsepower of the engines, but officials are intent on maintaining the current levels. There are no guarantees a horsepower increase would have enough of an impact, they have said, while it would also raise costs and discourage a potential new manufacturer from wanting to enter the Cup Series.

That has shifted the focus to tire supplier Goodyear, which now finds itself as both the popular target of blame and the last, best hope to be the Next Gen’s short-track savior. When Goodyear accidentally introduced a high-wear tire at the Bristol spring race and fans liked it, the talk for the rest of the spring and summer shifted to what the company could do for the entertainment quality of the racing.

But that seemed to hit a wall last week when Goodyear and NASCAR were unable to replicate the conditions from the spring race, and the tires barely wore out at all.

“Nobody has the answers,” points leader Kyle Larson told SiriusXM Radio this week. “Goodyear doesn’t have the answer. NASCAR doesn’t have the answer about their car and why it doesn’t run good in traffic. The drivers, the teams and the engineers — we don’t have the answers either.”

Larson was speaking of his frustration after the Bristol race — which he dominated in near-record fashion — was viewed as a dud. He posted a rare, lengthy post on X in which he defended Goodyear.

“We’re trying to crutch this race car on short tracks with the tire and then blame Goodyear every week cause cars can’t pass,” Larson wrote. “I don’t have the answer to fix what we currently have and neither do you but please stop blaming Goodyear. It’s not a tire problem.”

“Temper your expectations,” Larson concluded. “We’re driving spec race cars.”

Ultimately, the last sentence appears to be the biggest culprit. Because the Next Gen model requires all teams to purchase identical parts and pieces from a single-source supplier instead of building the vehicles themselves, there is barely any separation between the speed of one car to the next.

On bigger tracks, it creates close, compelling racing in which the field finds it difficult to get away from each other. But when 36 cars get put onto a half-mile track, all running relatively the same speed, even the most talented drivers have an extreme challenge in making passes.

To that end, Hamlin crew chief Chris Gabehart told Frontstretch that Saturday’s show was actually “as racy as you can expect it to be at Bristol with this car.”

“They’re all separated by point-zero-nothing and physics is a buffer,” Gabehart said. “These are the world’s best stock car teams and drivers. If you don’t give them enough ways to separate themselves, that’s what you’re going to see.”

Similarly, Larson crew chief Cliff Daniels on Thursday told SiriusXM: “The overarching goal of the Next Gen car was to create parity, and now we have so much parity that we’re trying to create disparity with the tires.”

Ultimately, though, it can’t all fall on Goodyear. Nearly three years of this car show the current product on short tracks is not a fluke; if the car isn’t changed in some significant way, this seems to be what fans will see going forward.

So perhaps it’s time to accept that as reality instead of waiting for something dramatic to change. Asked this week if there were any more potential fixes on the horizon, one Cup Series driver texted: “This is it. Everything else is whipped cream on s—.”

(Top photo of action from last weekend’s Bristol Night Race: Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)

Jeff Gluck has been traveling on the NASCAR beat since 2007, with stops along the way at USA Today, SB Nation, NASCAR Scene magazine and a Patreon-funded site, JeffGluck.com. He's been hosting tweetups at NASCAR tracks around the country since 2009 and was named to SI's Twitter 100 (the top 100 Twitter accounts in sports) for five straight years.