Denny Hamlin calls out Next Gen car, reveals 'nothing on the horizon' to improve car

NASCAR has caught a ton of flak for their Next Gen car design, and it’s been magnified after another disappointing weekend at a short-track in Bristol Motor Speedway. Denny Hamlin certainly isn’t biting his tongue on the matter.

Evidently, the Virginia native is yearning for change when it comes to the Next Gen car. He spoke on the matter during the latest episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast, delivering some unfortunate news for fans hoping to see an adjustment, as well.

“You will not pass when the field runs the same speed. I’ve said this week after week, I don’t know what we expect. This is the car we built. This is what ownership of NASCAR wanted. They wanted to build a sports car and we’re going to race this sports car on all these different tracks. It just doesn’t race well. I think that there are fixes that we can do to it, but I’m not in charge. I’m part of NASCAR meetings. There’s nothing on the horizon. There’s been no discussion of fixing things that that really need to be addressed on it,” Hamlin revealed.

“One in particular is just the platform in which we run it on, where the back is squashed down to the ground and the front is a foot in the air. Of course it’s bad in traffic. You get a front-end that’s not on the ground, it’s in the air because we have to feed the underbody of the car. As soon as we get behind somebody, that thing just lifts right on up. You got no front downforce. It plows. You’ve got to get the attitude of the car correct. We’ve got to get more over-body, less underbody, because that’s what the Xfinity car has.”

Hamlin thinks the difference between the car run in the Cup Series versus the Xfinity Series is grand, and it’s time to close the gap. The top driver in NASCAR simply can’t pass each other when they’re in traffic, and you can see why that would be a problem on short-tracks, like Bristol and Martinsville. 

“This is my theory. I’m no aerodynamicist. Let me just preface this. There’s many team engineers and smart people that listen to this podcast that I’m sure will correct me, but I’ve done this long enough to understand. The advantage of the Xfinity car is that the second-place guy can manipulate the leader. In Cup cars, you cannot. When we catch someone that we are slightly faster than, we have no tools to slow them down,” Hamlin added.

“In Xfinity, you just drive up right to their bumper and it takes their rear downforce away. They wiggle-waggle up the racetrack. Then, you go past them. In the Cup car, you can run right in the back of someone and it does not disrupt their car whatsoever. It’s because all the downforce is made from underneath, not over top. So I believe that we need to have more over-body, get these cars pitched up in the back, like we’re supposed to run them.

“That way, hopefully, the second-place car can- when they get close to the rear of the first-place car, it gets them loose and it takes grip away from them, instead of taking grip away from you. That’s the crux of the problem that we have on short-tracks, amongst many other issues, such as low horsepower, big, wide tires that don’t fall off. Those are all major problems, I get it. But the platform in which we have to run these cars to make them fast is horrible in traffic. Absolutely horrible in traffic.”

All told, Denny Hamlin is speaking for a majority of fans, media members and drivers by panning the Next Gen car. Will we see changes in the Cup Series? It doesn’t sound like they’re coming any time soon, but NASCAR might want to adjust that timeline and listen to the feedback they’re getting at the moment.