There are always bound to be problems when a new racecar is introduced. Oftentimes the issues are based around reliability.
In the case of the Next Gen car, reliability was actually pretty good for most of the season. It’s that the chassis was extremely stiff.
The mandate to cut costs for the team resulted in a much less crushable car than the previous Gen 6 car. When these cars crash, those forces still have to go somewhere. It appears that one place those forces went was directly toward the drivers.
And the sad truth of the matter is that this was likely preventable.
NASCAR put a significant amount of time into crash testing the Next Gen car. Sports Business Journal’s Matt Crossman interviewed John Patalak, NASCAR’s senior director of safety engineering, in 2021 about the testing process. At the time, Patalak described using eight years’ worth of black-box data, along with a medical database of driver injuries in the Gen 6 car and the Car of Tomorrow to determine which areas of the car on which to focus. There were also significant tests of the foam that went into the new car, both in computer models, simulations and real life.
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One can never do enough testing for these types of situations. However, the problem that emerged as the season went on is that the types of crashes that injured drivers in 2022 didn’t really injure anyone in previous years. Or, if they did, those crashes didn’t injure the drivers enough that they felt the need to comment on them or seek treatment.
Because there were crashes of the Next Gen car prior to the competition debut at February’s Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum — quite a few, actually.
Prior to the COVID-19 lockdowns, William Byron crashed a test car at Auto Club Speedway in 2020. Testing at Charlotte Motor Speedway in November and December 2021 resulted in a series of spins. Likely the biggest crash was one that Austin Dillon had in November where he went head on into the wall.
The Phoenix Raceway test in January also saw a number of spins. Front Row Motorsports’ Todd Gilliland also spun and backed into the wall in turn 2.
On the surface, Gilliland’s crash ended up looking rather innocuous. However, it was this kind of crash that played a much bigger role in the 2022 season than it ever should have.
Once the racing got underway, it became rather obvious that…
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