NASCAR Wanted To Throw Out The Rule Book For The All-Star Race But The Teams Said ‘No’ — Here’s Why

NASCAR’s seventh generation “Next Gen” Cup Series car remains a work in progress in its fourth season. One of the biggest gripes from fans, drivers and teams alike is that it doesn’t create good racing on short tracks.

NASCAR has fiddled with the body and tire rules, but has yet to come up with a great solution, so its latest idea was to have no rules at all.

NASCAR proposed to the teams that they could modify the cars anyway they like for the upcoming All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway in the hopes that the racing would be spiced up and maybe some new ideas about updating the car would surface. The teams said “no.”

Denny Hamlin explained why on this week’s episode of his “Actions Detrimental” podcast.

“The thought of having cars that are different speeds than each other is fantastic, that means passing will be more plentiful, there’s a lot of positives that can come from that,” Hamlin said.

“Everyone wants to have fun and do all these things, but who is going to pay for it?”

Hamlin drives for Joe Gibbs Racing, but also co-owns the three-car 23XI Racing team.

“We’re going to destroy three of our cars to build this car,” he said.

“Under the rules that were kind of put in front it was like, ‘you have to use Next Gen parts, but you can do whatever you want to them.’ So what we’re going to do is destroy every piece and part of that car.”

Hamlin noted that the cars cost around $300,000 each.

“We’re going to bend the chassis, we’re going to do all types of things to this thing that will make it illegal at any other racetrack that we go to,” he said.

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE FREE AMERICAN CARS AND RACING NEWSLETTER

The Next Gen car is a spec chassis that was designed to control costs and each team only gets seven per car number for the season, unless one is wrecked beyond repair. Hamlin said NASCAR didn’t offer to add an allotment for the All-Star Race car and that it would likely cost 23XI Racing a total of $2 million to build them, while the purse for the race is just a winner-take-all $1 million. “Triple the prize money, let’s do it then,” he suggested.

FOLLOW AMERICAN CARS AND RACING ON X

Hamlin said if they’d limited the scope of the modifications, rather than allow everything to be changed, it might have been feasible, but that wasn’t an option.

“It’s not possible under the parameters that were set in front of us.”