There are obvious issues that still remain two weeks into the 2022 regular season surrounding the Gen 7 race car.
Tires are seemingly being shredded at a moment’s notice and if a driver spins out, but can’t make it back to pit road by themselves, they’re going to go multiple laps down essentially taking them out of contention.
Cars crashed all afternoon. The race obliterated the track record for cautions in a 400-mile race.
It’s okay to be disappointed to an extent, but its important to look back and compare what type of racing we were watching in NASCAR a year ago.
What we watched on Sunday was awesome. Drivers were fighting their cars. No one held the lead because the chase car got held up in air. We saw cars that were hard enough to drive that guys were spinning out.
That’s the aspects of intermediate track racing that made NASCAR popular – why it went away from those with the old, Gen 6 cars will be debated, probably forever if we’re being honest. The product at Auto Club Speedway, though, brought back the compelling parts of the sport – and it did it on national TV.
I know there were always bigger issues in the real world, but my chest would just tighten watching NA18D races when I would see a faster car get stuck in dirty air and not lifting. It just made me so frustrated because I could literally see it.
Today is just plain good.
— Matt Weaver (@MattWeaverRA) February 27, 2022
Because of the product on the track today, any doubts that I had about the car have gone to what happens when the vehicles wreck – at least for now.
Two weeks into the season, that’s huge. It alleviates any worries of a boring race like we’d routinely see in the Coca Cola 600 with the horsepower package that I don’t wish to call by name.
There’s things that need fix, but most of the issues surround wheels.
Kyle Busch, Christopher Bell, Josh Bilicki, Ross Chastain and Chris Buescher were all forced out of the contention in the race with single-car spins.
When the cars go around, the tires are more susceptible to going flat and with the new mechanics of them, it makes it incredibly harder to nurse the car back to the pits.
NASCAR has said that it is looking into why this is and how to fix the issue, but if it was simple, it wouldn’t have been happening in the first place.
Had it not been for issues like this, we would have seen even more parity than we did – and the race produced nine different teams recording top 10 finishes.
For that reason, I’d consider the entire day a success, maybe not for the HMS guys but one of their drivers still won the race.
Produce more finishes like this and NASCAR will have no issue growing to a size we haven’t seen since the first part of the century.
RETWEET TO CONGRATULATE KYLE LARSON ON HIS WIN IN FONTANA! pic.twitter.com/Y41oyKb2qV
— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) February 28, 2022
With the Gen 7 car’s introduction, the potential had always been there.
But with what we saw today, the potential appears like its actually achievable… for once.
