It’s now been two years since NASCAR introduced the NextGen car, but it sounds like the car is still leading to complaints from drivers. This week, it was Denny Hamlin who expressed his frustration about the car.
During an appearance on the Actions Detrimental podcast last week, Denny Hamlin did not hold back his criticism as he made it clear that he is not happy with the NextGen cars, calling attention to how difficult it is to pass in the new cars.
“A good car is able to pass. Then they are able to manipulate the car in front of them instead of getting manipulated by the car in front of them,” Hamlin said according to On3. “That is the big difference between Xfinity and Cup, is that Cup, the closer you get to them, your car takes off. You lose all downforce. It’s done.
“The closer you get to the car in front of you in Xfinity … they start losing rear downforce, and then they get off the bottom and they shuck them.”
Hamlin called it a “physics problem” with the NexGen car.
“Now you can’t do that because they are not making any over-body aerodynamics, and it’s all under-body,” Hamlin said. “So you’re not able to take air off their spoiler, because there’s not hardly any air going on the spoiler in the first place. We got a physics problem. I wish they would just let us come up with our own package for that track just one time, and let us decide what we’re gonna run.”
We’ll have to see whether or not NASCAR makes changes in the future.
