The 2024 NASCAR Cup season has begun in earnest.
Following the non-points exhibition race at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum won by Denny Hamlin earlier this month, Joey Logano took pole for this weekend’s Daytona 500 season opener by leading a Ford front-row lockout in qualifying on Wednesday night.
Logano and McDowell underlined the potency of the new Mustang by locking out the front row in qualifying
Photo by: Matthew T. Thacker / NKP / Motorsport Images
Thursday night’s twin 150-mile qualifying races set the remainder of the grid, with Jimmie Johnson among the two unchartered drivers who booked the two remaining slots in the 40-car field for NASCAR’s blue ribband event.
Here are five things to look out for as the new campaign kicks into gear.
Ford and Toyota debut new car bodies
While the 2024 NASCAR Cup season features new drivers and new venues, there will also be an updated look to the entries from Toyota and Ford: Toyota Racing Development and Ford Performance are to debut new iterations of their respective Camry and Mustang race cars.
In early November, Ford unveiled its new-version Mustang for competition in 2024 based on the Mustang ‘Dark Horse’, the seventh generation of the revered model. Since arriving in Cup in 2019, the Mustang has won a manufacturers’ championship and series-best 18 races in 2020, and drivers’ championships with Team Penske pair Logano and Ryan Blaney in 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Later that same month, Toyota followed with its new Camry XSE race car for Cup series competition. The Camry XSE Next Gen follows the Toyota Camry TRD Next Gen, which produced 18 victories and 25 poles during the past two seasons of competition.
Denny Hamlin, Joe Gibbs Racing, FedEx Toyota Camry
Photo by: Nickolas Wolf
How the new bodies will change those teams’ performance is pretty much an open book yet to be filled with data. Each car had just one limited on-track test prior to the 3 February pre-season Busch Light Clash exhibition at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which was won by Toyota driver Hamlin. With such restricted testing and only a short exhibition race under their belts, the expected performance gains have largely been illustrated though computer models.
“All the tools we use – the wind tunnel, the CFD – all of that carries back and forth,” says Richard Johns, Ford’s NASCAR performance leader. “So, what we learn in the development of the Cup…
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