NASCAR has had many issues with the Next gen car when it comes to safety. It all started in testing with drivers saying wrecks felt harder. What may not look like much in the next gen car, could be very violent for the driver. The reason for this is because of how the cars are designed, they were made stiffer on purpose. They are now harder to destroy, most wrecks wont kill the car. However the car does not bend and take some of the impact, the driver feels every hit. This is something that needs worked on and improved or the stars of the sport will miss races every year.
The next gen car also has other problems, including fires. The problem is mostly with the fords, but Alex Bowman in a chevy was, i believe, the first car to have the problem. The fires seem to start around the exhaust, the cause is not clear but many think its rubber build up catching on fire and spreading. Nascar thinks they have the fix, but time will tell. It only came after Kevin Harvick spoke out about it. “We just keep letting cars burn up, letting people crash into stuff, get hurt. We don’t fix anything, They don’t care. It’s cheaper to not fix it.”
NASCAR has been the safest racing in the world for years, but before 2001 they were slow on safety. From 1994 through 2000 NASCAR had 6 Drivers pass away(Neil Bonnett, Rodney Orr, John Nemechek, Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin Jr, Tony Roper) racing in the top 3 series of NASCAR. NASCAR made no real safety changes until Dale Earnhardt passed away on the last lap of the Daytona 500. After that NASCAR kicked it into overdrive and now every track has safer walls and a HANS device is mandatory. They also made many changes to the cars and built a new car, the COT which put safety first. The Kurt crash and drivers speaking out need to be taken seriously, because the sport can not afford to go backwards in safety.
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Honestly, I am not a fan of the next gen car. It just seems too controlled. I get what they were trying to achieve with this project. It is very much an auto racing version of attempting to mix socialism and capitalism. The goal was to level the playing field economically and increase the competition on the track by doing so. It works in economics for some countries, but in others it often fails. Giving the government (or governing body in this case) this much control opens up the door for things like corruption and overlooking serious concerns (such as safety.) Given everything bad that has happened with this car and how slow it has been in regards to fixing the cars, I feel like NASCAR’s foray into spec racing looks more like the USSR than Sweden (to stick with the socio-economic theory analogy.)
Yes we have many different race winners. Yet there is one big winner when it comes to providing parts that both fail often and have no competition… surely one can see how bad of a recipe that is for the sport?
Parts fail, teams have to buy more from the approved vender, and “parity” is achieved on the race track due to the parts failures… There is nothing in this recipe that would promote the correction of anything. Do we really believe that NASCAR officials have enough individual agency to break out of the very system they constructed and put more costs upon themselves, when the parts failures only deliver their desired outcomes?
We would all love for more teams to be competitive but not at the expense of the safety and the integrity of the sport. Get rid of this approach all together. Increase on track competition in some other fashion. The teams have an interest in their parts not failing. NASCAR does not.