Kevin Harvick lays into NASCAR’s Next Gen after | Sports News

Kevin Harvick has joined the critics of NASCAR’s Next Gen car after low top-end velocity and soiled air plagued the Cup Series’ latest Iowa Corn 350 Powered by Ethanol.

The weekend bought off to a tough begin in Iowa for what must be NASCAR’s premier racing collection, with the Next Gen vehicles outpaced by these of the ARCA Menards Series – it is fourth tier and one of its developmental collection.

17-year-old Brent Crews certified on pole for the Atlas 150 within the No. 1 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, with a time of 22.901 seconds. By comparability, JGR’s Chase Briscoe began Sunday’s Cup Series race on pole, having certified with a time of 23.004 seconds within the No. 19 Toyota.

Come race day, the Cup Series race was held back by poor aero, with soiled air making it exceptionally tough to go, as William Byron in the end received from second within the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.

The Next Gen car’s short monitor package deal has been a lot maligned since its debut in 2022, changing the Gen 6 vehicles, with its lack of energy a specific bone of competition. To put it merely, in keeping with 2014 Cup Series champion Harvick on his podcast, “The car sucks.”

“It’s not fun to see the car not be able to pass like it needs to be,” he went on to confess. “And it turned into a fuel mileage track position race. And that part, I don’t like, and it doesn’t seem like we’re making any ground on making it better.

“I think that Goodyear has done a good job in making the tires a little bit better, but definitely need…it wound up being exciting because there was, it was edgy. Cars were hard to drive. The track is rough. The track’s got everything that it needs, but man, it’s tough to watch a fuel mileage race on a short track.”

Harvick later defined that, in his opinion, this technology of vehicles has to go quicker, calling on groups and producers to make main adjustments to the horsepower out there, quite than any incremental bumps.

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“The Cup cars need to go way faster, especially at the short tracks. And I don’t think that there way anything more evident than this weekend,” he mentioned. “The ARCA car outqualified the Cup car, and it was extremely difficult to pass. The slower you go, the harder it’s going to be to pass, the faster the mid-corner speed is.

“I know there’s talk about *that much* horsepower; we need *that much* horsepower. And I think when you look at the short tracks and road courses having too much power, I’d air to that side, because it was just…there’s just no reason that the Cup cars should be the slowest thing there on the weekend.”

Harvick additionally felt that the poor race expertise can also be detrimental to the expertise of being a Cup Series driver, including, “In the end, the cars are so d— slow they don’t race good.”

As for who’s responsible for these points, Harvick positioned it on each the producers and the groups. “I think a lot of it is the manufacturers and being able to have enough lead time to get the parts and pieces for their engines and the costs associated with that,” he mentioned. “But, I think in this type of situation, I think the teams are as much of a holdup as NASCAR because of the fact that they’re going to have to spend money and change the things that come with that.”

Currently, the Next Gen vehicles have round 670 horsepower on faucet, with some tracks, comparable to Daytona and Talladega, seeing this lowered to round 510. By comparability, the Gen 6 vehicles approached 900 horsepower at their peak.

Thankfully for Cup Series followers, an increase in horsepower is one thing that Mike Forde, NASCAR’s managing director of communications, mentioned in May on the Hauler Talk podcast is being thought-about. Specifically, Forde mentioned pushing 750 horsepower may come as quickly because the 2025 season, through NASCAR.

In a subsequent podcast, Forde added that the dialogue had reemerged at a later assembly with drivers and crew homeowners, particularly with regard to their short monitor package deal. “Obviously, the drivers all embraced that topic and requested more and more horsepower,” he defined. “So we said, ‘You got it. We’ll look into it.’ We are working with engine builders on that, and we’ll see if this is something that’s put into place this season.”