In its early years, NASCAR relied on machines shaped by the hands of mechanics, engineers, and crew chiefs long before they ever rolled onto the racetrack. Teams would soup up engines, stiffen chassis, and chase every edge in the age-old pursuit of winning on Sunday. As the rulebook thickened over time, NASCAR tightened the bolts on that freedom, stripping teams of the liberty to fine-tune their cars for extra performance. By the time the Next Gen era arrived in 2022, nearly every component had been standardized, a shift that former crew chief Ray Evernham continues to lament.
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Through the 1960s and 1970s, the rule structure left enough room for ingenuity to flourish. Teams famously created aerodynamic icons like the Dodge Charger Daytona and the Plymouth Superbird. But by the 1990s and early 2000s, NASCAR had clamped down, narrowing the lanes for innovation.
The Next Gen car pushes that restraint to its farthest point: uniform parts, centrally sourced suppliers, and almost no tolerance for meaningful adjustments. The approach improved cost control and safety, yet it also boxed in the garage creativity that once defined the sport. Speaking with John Roberts on Kenny Wallace’s show, Evernham outlined how drastically the landscape has changed.
“We used to call it rubbing on the cars. We’d rub on it every little thing that we could do to make that car better than everybody else’s. And we used to have a saying that a racecar is never done. It just gets time to go race it… I feel that’s something that we need to get back into it.”
However, Evernham wants to see the sport reclaim its heartbeat. He wants to see more personality, more human personality put back into the sport.
“I think this new Gen 7 cars will, it’ll never drive the cost down, but it’ll stop the curve from going up at such an angle… I would like to see them put more adjustment back into that car so that the guys had things they could do during the race to make it better, rather than having to worry about fuel mileage all the time.”
Evernham sees how limited the toolbox has become. When a driver unloads with a bad car, the team spends the day stuck behind the eight ball. Outside of tire pressure tweaks and minor changes, there is little they can do.
That’s why the former crew chief wants more opportunities for adjustment, more ways to tailor the machine to the driver, and a return to the human touch that once steered the sport’s identity.
At present, NASCAR leans heavily on machinery, simulation, and computer direction, a far cry from the days when the DNA of the driver, crew chief, and team shaped machines built by hand.
Those cars carried personality because teams could shape them around their drivers rather than forcing drivers to match simulation-dictated behavior. Evernham believes the sport thrived when teams had the latitude to make a car suit its driver instead of chasing prescribed setups.
And NASCAR appears to recognize that gap. League president Steve O’Donnell recently signaled that the sanctioning body is evaluating areas of the Next Gen platform where teams may regain the ability to work beyond single-source parts. He acknowledged the need to revive the competitive spark that once allowed teams to tweak their way into an advantage.
