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After a summer of flips, NASCAR is making major changes to its Next Gen car for this Sunday’s race at Talladega. NASCAR is adding a rocker skirt and fabric to the roof flaps and extending the right side of the roof rails.
This season, NASCAR has had a rather interesting problem. Rather than flips like Ryan Preece catching the grass and tumbling like Ryan Newman and Darrell Waltrip before him, cars have been blowing over, similar to that of the Car of Tomorrow over a decade ago.
There have been flips with these Next Gen cars in the past. However, there have been a few that were pure blowovers. The first of which was in the car’s debut at Daytona in 2022. In his debut Daytona 500 in 2022, Harrison Burton blew over on the backstretch on lap 63.
This year, starting in Michigan, there were two weeks in a row in which cars blew over at high speeds. First, Corey Lajoie, at Michigan, flipped in a manner that looked almost as if the wind picked him up and sat him on his roof.
The next week at Daytona, with the laps winding down, a big crash with nine to go saw Michael McDowell picked up by the air and slug on his side through turns one and two. McDowell would get on all four tires with ease. Following the crash, the NBC crew complimented NASCAR for its innovations that kept the No. 34 from going over.
Unfortunately, following this red flag, a much more striking and awe-inspiring crash would happen on the backstretch, with Josh Berry’s No. 4 flipping and striking the inside wall with due force.
After the two prior incidents, fans were not overly concerned about the blowovers. However, almost immediately after the McDowell wreck, Josh Berry’s frightening crash led to fans, insiders, and drivers calling for action.
Tuesday afternoon, NASCAR announced major changes to the Next Gen’s aero package with the hope of preventing these flips.
First, NASCAR will extend the skirting around the rocker box. In a post to NASCAR.com, NASCAR states that the goal of this extension is “eliminating space between the car’s floor and the ground beneath it.”
Of course, this is not the most significant change NASCAR is making. The sport’s governing body is making multiple changes to the roof of the Next Gen car for Talladega.
The roof flaps, one of the most important safety additions in NASCAR history, will have a new part this week. Rather than a massive overhaul, teams will have a small piece of triangular fabric added to the back side of the flap. The goal, as NASCAR states, is for that fabric to act as a “parachute” when the flaps deploy.
Finally, NASCAR is expanding the roof rails on the right side of the car. There was talk that NASCAR would implement an air deflector on the right side of the windshield. However, NASCAR extended this roof rail rather than this addition to the windshield. This two-inch extension follows a trend with this aero package, keeping it simple rather than overhauling the car.
Keeping with that trend, NASCAR is making it easy for teams to add these features to the car by making them simple additions and supplying the teams with these parts.
Hopefully, these changes will prevent cars from blowing over this weekend at Talladega. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing. Talladega is and always will be unpredictable, but maybe, just this once, NASCAR has it figured out.
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