Five thoughts after the 2022 NASCAR Cup Series season concluded last weekend …
1. Big-picture view
With apologies to Ross Chastain’s Hail Melon, the most memorable race weekend of 2022 remains the Clash at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum.
It might sound crazy to put that label on an exhibition race nine months ago, particularly with all the unpredictable days that followed throughout the season. But that feat, in many ways, was one of the most unique situations in NASCAR’s last two decades.
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If you recall, there were some crucial unknowns in the days and weeks leading into the Clash. Would the new Next Gen cars be able to make it through a race without mechanical failures? Would every team even have enough parts to field a car at all? Would the temporary, purpose-built stadium track hold up once cars started making laps?
Those were real questions and real concerns. But the event turned out to be a tremendous success, and the amount of positivity flowing through the oft-cynical Cup garage afterward served as a tone-setter for one of the most remarkable seasons we’ve seen.
“A year ago, someone asked me, ‘What keeps you up at night?’” NASCAR president Steve Phelps said. “The car kept me up at night — whether we could put that car on the racetrack at the Clash at the Coliseum.
“You had supply chain issues, all the rest of it. If you … get to the Clash at the Coliseum and you don’t have a race car? There’s no safety net. You can’t go back to the old car. It’s too late. You’re done. We wouldn’t race.
“I know that sounds dramatic, but if you think about it, there was no safety net, no wires. It was our car and needed to be on the racetrack.”
No, the Next Gen wasn’t perfect in the races that followed. In the early summer, drivers started going public with the severity of the impacts they were taking in the car — and it finally manifested itself in Kurt Busch’s season-ending concussion at Pocono. Then, when Alex Bowman became the second already-qualified playoff driver to miss races with a concussion, the safety concerns reached a fever pitch.
The car also had early-season issues like getting stuck when tires went flat or breaking toe links with relatively minor impacts — and late-season problems like fires caused by rubber buildup.
But if you take a step back and look at 2022 as a whole, the Next Gen was largely a success on the racetrack. The car appeared to transform racing at intermediate-length venues, which had long been NASCAR’s biggest and seemingly most unsolvable problem; seven of this season’s top eight races in the “Was It a Good Race?” poll were on intermediate tracks or their 2-mile cousins (Michigan and Fontana).
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With the exception of Texas (which seems beyond saving regardless of the vehicle), all 11 intermediate/2-mile track races this season scored over a 70 percent approval rating in the poll.
That said, road courses and short tracks took a hit compared to their traditional high standards, and superspeedways didn’t quite have the same magic. But at least NASCAR is working on a fix (see Item No. 3).
Still, the car succeeded in transforming the way we look at the Cup Series. It allowed for a team like Trackhouse Racing to become the story of the season and use smarts and setups to put a first-time playoff driver into the final four. It created a record-tying 19 different winners (and could have easily been 21 had a couple more races played out differently) and left the championship in doubt all year long.
The regular season was perhaps NASCAR’s best and most exciting ever. And though the playoffs stumbled with the safety concerns, mechanical problems and controversies like the caution-causing Roval sign, Chastain’s Martinsville move for the ages will be all people remember a decade from now.
No, it wasn’t a flawless season. There’s still work to be done on the car and major issues to be resolved within the sport (like the looming financial showdown between teams and NASCAR).
But considering where things started and the fears about getting cars on the track every week, this season turned out to be pretty good. If NASCAR can continue to build from here with the schedule, driver personalities and the competition itself, everything will be just fine.
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2. Thinking ahead
On a restart at Martinsville Speedway, Tyler Reddick ran into the back of Noah Gragson’s car and caused Reddick’s head to go forward. At nearly the same moment, he was rear-ended from behind — which forced Reddick’s head to pop back sharply against the headrest.
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Reddick immediately sensed something was weird with his head and pulled his No. 8 car into the garage soon afterward to retire from the race.
“It didn’t feel good and I knew I wasn’t 100 percent,” Reddick said. “Normally when you have bumps, you just keep going. That one felt different. It was definitely the right call to get out of the car.”
Though Reddick was cleared to return at Phoenix following evaluations with doctors, he said he’d make the same decision again in the future — even if he was competing for a spot in the final four.
“Knowing what I do now after I got out of the car, if I’m ever in that situation again, I don’t continue,” Reddick said. “I was showing symptoms, so it was the right decision to get out of the car. If that happened again, I don’t care if I’m leading, running last, whatever.”
Part of what Reddick knows now — aside from how he felt physically — is the data from a mouthpiece he’s been wearing in each race. The mouthpiece can sense what each impact does to a driver’s body (even going over bumps on a road course), which can be different than the sensors on the car.
In this case, Reddick said his mouthpiece revealed the restart stack-up was akin to “a pretty significant crash.” That’s not great, since the Next Gen car this season proved to be too stiff in the rear and was capable of causing concussions.
Reddick might have been spared a worse injury by getting out of his car and not continuing to race. He, along with NASCAR and other drivers, will be looking into what else they can do to the foam and head surround/headrest area in the offseason to reduce such injuries in the future.
“The rash reaction to this would be to soften up the back of my head surround,” Reddick said. “But at the same time, if it’s not SFI approved and it’s not what you should have in the car, you could be exposing yourself to other kinds of risks. There’s a reason we’re at where we’re at with head surround foams. As much you would think softer is better, it could be bad in other ways. If it’s too soft, it could grab your head and expose you to rotational forces, which are just as dangerous.”
NASCAR is planning to implement a new rear clip design prior to next season, which could help with the type of impacts Reddick, Bowman and Busch suffered. But there are also things drivers and teams can do to their seats and safety equipment to help the process.
“We changed some headrest stuff and helmet stuff, just trying to be as preventative as we can,” Bowman said upon his return at Phoenix. “There’s a lot of really smart people at (Hendrick) who went through and evaluated everything. Just trying to make everything the best it can be.”
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3. Package positives
If you missed it during the busy Phoenix weekend, there was a nugget of good news regarding how the Next Gen car races at short tracks and road courses.
NASCAR’s Steve O’Donnell said officials are “for sure looking at some aero changes for both short tracks and road courses” and even left the door open to increasing horsepower at those venues (though he said that topic was “a little more complicated”).
NASCAR, through its experimentation with the Garage 56 project car that will race at Le Mans next year, has found some aero tweaks that could be implemented in the Cup Series “as early as next year,” O’Donnell added.
While it would be nice if there was a type of vehicle that raced well on all types of circuits and never required any sort of different rules packages from one to another, that seems unrealistic. NASCAR has tried it twice recently and both times ultimately came to the conclusion it would need some variation between short tracks/road courses and intermediates (just like how the superspeedway package has typically been different over the years).
And that’s important, because next year’s two new marquee races — the All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro and the Chicago Street Course — both are on the type of layouts that could use some work to improve the show. When you add in another Clash at the Coliseum, the cutoff races at Bristol and Martinsville, and another championship race at Phoenix, it’s vital for NASCAR to get the Next Gen racing better on shorter tracks.
The positive is NASCAR acknowledges that and already is down the road with potential adjustments.
“A lot of work is being done collectively to focus on both areas,” O’Donnell said.
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4. Notable stats
This season of parity created some unusual and remarkable statistics across several areas, and not just for achievements like the 19 different drivers in victory lane or a Modern-Era-record five first-time winners.
Chase Elliott was tops in both laps led (857) and average finish (12.5) for all Cup Series drivers. And yet both of those totals were the lowest for a category leader in the Modern Era (the latter being the lowest for a leader in NASCAR’s 74-year history).
Compare that to the 2021 season, when Kyle Larson led a whopping 2,581 laps and Denny Hamlin had a series-best 8.4 average finish. There was certainly nowhere close to such dominance from any driver this season.
And really, the numbers throughout the entire field show the struggle of finding any sort of consistency. Last year, there were five drivers who had 30 or more lead-lap finishes (out of the 36 races). This year? None.
Reliability issues and crashes were on the rise as well in 2022, leading to an increase in DNFs. Last year, 27 Cup Series drivers had five or fewer DNFs. But in 2022, only 14 drivers made it through the season while avoiding more than five DNFs.
The champion was also symbolic of the parity-filled season. Joey Logano tied his fewest number of top-10 finishes over the last decade (17) and had his second-worst average finish in the past nine years — yet he won the title.
On another note, there were also some individual accomplishments worth mentioning.
Although Michael McDowell missed the playoffs, he ended the season with 12 top-10 finishes — or as many as his previous four years combined — and improved his career-best average finish by nearly four positions (16.7 vs. 20.5). The new car certainly helped Front Row Motorsports take a step forward.
Chastain led the Cup Series in both top-fives (15) and top-10s (21), which is notable because his career totals in those categories entering this season were three and nine, respectively. He also led 692 laps this season after having a previous career total of 75.
And in the season finale, Kevin Harvick set a NASCAR standard with his 19th consecutive top-10 at Phoenix — the longest streak any driver has recorded at a single track. But Harvick, the Phoenix all-time wins leader, has only one win there in the last 13 races and didn’t seem impressed by his streak.
“I just want to win,” he said.
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5. Rookie recap
NASCAR’s three Cup Series rookies each went through their own unique development processes during Year 1.
Team Penske’s Austin Cindric was crowned Rookie of the Year after he made the playoffs because the award goes to the highest finisher in the standings. But even without the Daytona 500 win that locked him into the 16-driver field, Cindric ended up scoring the 15th-most points of the season. He had a respectable five top-five finishes (one more than former Cup champ Martin Truex Jr.) and 25 lead-lap finishes (which from this view is the most reliable way to grade one’s rookie season).
“There’s a difference between when I felt like I belonged and when I felt like this was normal,” Cindric said. “Racing in the Cup Series didn’t become normal until about May. But I felt like even the (seven) races I did last year, I had enough data points to convince myself this was the right time for me to be in the series and I had something to offer — whether it was to my race team, my sponsors or my manufacturer.”
The other two rookies had a combined one series start before this season, and their learning curve was steeper. Wood Brothers Racing’s Harrison Burton, who finished 27th in the standings with 18 lead-lap finishes, said he didn’t feel like he truly belonged until he qualified eighth for the Las Vegas Motor Speedway race in September.
In that session, it was the first time Burton felt he did everything he could have done to maximize his speed and understand the car.
“I don’t know why it took me so long,” he said. “It’s been a frustrating process where I feel like I’m on the limit of the car and the limit of the tire. And then I’ve made mistakes, spun out in practice, done that (stuff). And then it’s like, ‘How do you go further?’ These cars are so edgy and I finally felt kind of at peace with that.”
Burton said the habits formed during his two full seasons in the Xfinity Series have been tough to shake. Some of the techniques which were successful in Xfinity do not translate to the Next Gen Cup car.
“It’s not like an, ‘Oh, I’m scared to drive into the corner that deep,’” Burton said. “It’s a trust thing with the car and learning that.”
As for Todd Gilliland, the Front Row driver finished 28th in points with 17 lead-lap finishes and went from wide-eyed newbie to a driver who got accustomed to racing with his heroes — and talking to them without getting so starstruck.
“Showing up to Daytona, I was like, ‘Wow, this is insane! This is so cool,’” Gilliland recalled with a smile. “But now I feel like one of the drivers who belongs here. That’s been the coolest thing, and it goes along with the confidence — feeling like you belong is first off, and being able to run well is second.”
(Photo of 2022 champion Joey Logano in front of the L.A. Memorial Coliseum: Meg Oliphant / Getty Images)