Last season, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and his team cracked the code at Talladega Superspeedway, winning the YellaWood 500 by leaning heavily on a strategy that has become second nature with the Next Gen cars on Superspeedways — fuel saving. While many drivers, including Denny Hamlin, Ryan Blaney, and Kyle Busch, have voiced frustration over this approach, Stenhouse and his crew have embraced it wholeheartedly.
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For instance, following their Talladega success last year, Stenhouse’s crew chief, Mike Kelley, pointed out that, in his view, fuel-saving is no real controversy — just smarter teams playing the hand they are dealt. He emphasized that while the racing might appear less aggressive on the surface, it’s simply crew chiefs sharpening their pencils, leveraging strategy to outfox their rivals.
Given that the tactic has consistently borne fruit for them, it comes as no surprise that Kelley sees little reason to reinvent the wheel.
Now, as the third superspeedway race of the season looms at Talladega, during the media session, Stenhouse reflected on whether the arrival of the Next Gen cars forced him to rethink his superspeedway game plan. He stated, “Yeah, but I don’t feel like that has…if the teams had learned quicker that we needed to save more fuel and have a quicker pit stop, then I think we would have been doing this a long time ago.”
He believes all the teams are now reading from the same playbook, with everyone having access to the same information and the same people working behind the scenes at the shop. While he acknowledges that the mindset has shifted compared to the early days of his speedway career, when the only goal was to stay glued to the front, today’s approach requires a different tack.
Now, even if a driver is running between the 15th and 20th, they can leapfrog the field and find themselves in a prime position to steal the win.
For Ricky Stenhouse Jr., his crew constantly feeds him updates on his fuel-saving status relative to the rest of the field during every run. In his words, “I am taking that information and trying to position myself as far forward as I can without using fuel. And so that is a totally different mindset now, in my opinion. I don’t really think it’s car-related, but it’s a strategy. And it’s different plays, and sometimes it’s not the most fun.”
Nevertheless, this method has paid dividends for the Hyak Motorsports driver, helping him win two superspeedway victories over the past two years and secure solid finishes at tracks where chaos often rules the day.
However, it cannot be denied that with the dawn of the Next Gen era, the very fabric of superspeedway racing has taken a sharp turn, trading speed and aggression for calculated patience and survival tactics. Designed to slash costs and level the playing field, the Next Gen cars have ushered in a new era where saving fuel and flying under the radar until the closing laps has become the name of the game.
The days of severe drafting battles and constant lead changes that kept fans on the edge of their seats from the drop of the green flag are now a thing of the past. Today, it’s about coasting at half-throttle, biding your time, and waiting for the field to blink first.
