Persistent problems surrounding the Next Gen car have been prevalent in NASCAR over the last two seasons, but the governing body is hard at work to improve certain things. However, according to recently retired Cup Series driver Kevin Harvick, some major problems need fixing that he believes NASCAR would need to take back to the drawing board. One of those problems being the short-track package.
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During a recent conversation with Dale Earnhardt Jr. on his podcast, the 2014 Cup Series champion said, “They’re gonna take a big swing at it. I think they’re going to take a big swing at it at the Phoenix test and really try to wrangle the short track system back into where it needs to be, the short track package.”
Speaking about the tire test at Martinsville earlier and how much of it is involved in the overall sense, he stated, “I think that the tire is definitely involved in a lot of it. But I don’t think it, I think a lot of times what has happened is we go softer on the tire and the tire goes faster and lasts longer. So then it confuses everybody.”
“‘Okay, we made the tire softer. We put more heat in the tire and but the tire went further, and the tire went faster, lasted longer, and fell off less.’ So I think you know, I think everybody is wanting to go back to the drawing board and take a bigger I think they want to take bigger swings at it and I think they need to take bigger swings at it.”
Kevin Harvick asks for greater horsepower implementation in Next Gen cars
Speaking further into the conversation, Harvick said, “The only thing that concerns me is… But I just don’t know that there’s enough power in the racecar. Ever since we’ve and I get it. There’s way more to it than just saying, ‘Hey, we need more horsepower’. There’s the master plan of the car to bring more manufacturers and people in.”
“But if that race car would blow the back tires off of it and you had to think about putting that throttle down. It would change the way that you race and it would change the way that the tires were. It would just change so much because when we went to this new style car.”
The former Stewart Haas Racing driver then recounted a situation at Charlotte where the team reached a testing bottleneck and was given free rein to experiment. Harvick explained that they contacted Doug Yates and installed an intake spacer larger than the usual 550 horsepower ones. This ended up boosting the power output to 750 horsepower.
This resulted in a significant speed increase, leaving everyone confused. The altered spacer allowed for more maneuverability on the track, ultimately enhancing the car’s performance.
