NASCAR held a tire test at Bowman Gray Stadium on Tuesday to prepare for the series’ exhibition race at the LA Coliseum scheduled for February 5, 2022.
Bringing out Dale Earnhardt Jr., Clint Bowyer, and Tony Stewart to drive the cars at the famed short track built into a football stadium, it was sure to be a day filled with information for the series on the new car its building for 2022.
Earnhardt Jr. even delivered a groundbreaking quote, calling it a car that, ‘does everything better.'”
“It does everything better,” Earnhardt Jr. told NASCAR.com. “The (brakes) are one thing, but it turns. It’s got a bigger tire. More grip. More drive off. This thing just hunkers and goes.”
The former driver and current NBC broadcast talent raved about the new edition of the NASCAR Cup Series stock cars.
The biggest improvement he pointed out was the brakes on the car.
“I drove the car around the track,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “The brake performance is going to take some time for any of these guys to get used to. That’s the thing I found myself improving the most in my lap times – it’s letting the car get into the corner. Because the brakes work so much better, I’m overslowing the car using the brake pedal the way I’ve always used it in my life.”
Bowyer echoed Earnhardt Jr.’s comments about the brakes.
“The brakes are phenomenal,” Bowyer said. “That’s something that caught me off guard. They’re a little bit better than what we had. Part of that is the brake package and part of that is the car we had – the suspension components and all that.”
Stewart didn’t have much to say on the car to media members, having been five years removed from racing in NASCAR and routinely running his SRX series vehicles.
“If it was a track that I had already been on with the other car it would be easier to compare, but it’s kind of apples and oranges when it’s a different car and different track,” Stewart said. “So it’s hard to tell [the differences], honestly.”
The test, of course, was all geared for tires so that Goodyear would be prepared for the Clash at the Coliseum.
It looks like they might soften up the tires just a tad from the control set they brought to the track on Tuesday.
“Goodyear had a good plan coming into today, and I think they’re pretty happy with the results that they got,” Stewart said. “I think what they brought with the control set is probably a little harder than what they need. They brought a softer tire and they were pretty happy with it and I think that’s probably a combination of what they’ll bring out West.”
Bowyer said that the wider tire is going to play a big role.
“The tire is wider – quite a bit wider,” Bowyer said. “It’s about an inch and a half wider than what we had last year. That much more rubber on the race track is more grip for these guys to go out and do business.”
At the end of the day, it appears that NASCAR got what it needed to from the Bowman Gray test – at least from the comments that drivers have said about the car and tires.
Any doubts, too, of the February 5 exhibition can be eased a bit. Earnhardt Jr. made sure of that.
“It’s going to be crazy, and it’s going to work,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I was a little worried about the size of the track and that we haven’t seen our product on a track that size – recently anyways. Having driven the car here and walked around this race track – all of those worries I had were for no good reason. We’re going to give the west coast a taste of short track racing, NASCAR-style.”
NASCAR’s next NextGen test is scheduled for November 16 at Wythe Raceway – a Virginia-based dirt track – with Stewart Friesen behind the wheel. Always Race Day will have more information on future tests and any updates to this story as they become available.
Upcoming Confirmed NASCAR Next Gen Tests
Nov. 16 | Wythe Raceway (Stewart Friesen)
Nov. 17 | Charlotte Oval (Drivers TBA)
Nov. 18 | Charlotte Oval (Drivers TBA)
Dec. 13 | Phoenix (Drivers TBA)
Dec. 14 | Phoenix (Drivers TBA)
Jan. 11 | Daytona (Drivers TBA)
Jan. 12 | Daytona (Drivers TBA)
