Denny Hamlin (No. 11) and Kyle Larson (No. 5) side by side at Dover in 2024. Photo: Zach Catanzareti Photo / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
Christopher Bell led 93 laps at Charlotte on Sunday, and for long stretches of them he looked like he had a different engine than the rest of the field. Then Chase Briscoe got to the front and looked exactly the same. The Bank of America 400 ended with Briscoe beating Bell by 0.029 seconds, the closest Cup Series finish of 2026, but the 400 miles before the photo finish made a less flattering point about the car.
Whoever had clean air could leave. Whoever didn’t, couldn’t do much about it.
Denny Hamlin, who finished fifth, said as much on the Oct. 12 episode of his Actions Detrimental podcast. He said it “definitely seemed difficult to pass if it was within 35 laps of a run.” Then he added something more interesting than a complaint: a fix is being worked on.
“I know NASCAR is actively working on trying to get the pitch back in the cars. There’s rules that have to get changed to make that happen. There’s also unintended consequences that they’re trying to think through.”
Denny Hamlin, Actions Detrimental, Oct. 12, 2026
The target, in Hamlin’s words, is “getting the platform more back to where the O’Reilly’s car is,” a car where “jamming air behind somebody” still does something to the driver in front. NASCAR has not announced a rule change, and Hamlin gave no timeline. But “pitch” is a very specific word, and it points straight at the part of the Next Gen design that makes leading so valuable.
What “pitch” means, and why the Next Gen doesn’t have much
Pitch is the car rotating nose-down or nose-up around its middle. Under braking, the front dives. Under power, the rear squats. At speed, downforce presses the whole thing toward the track. For decades, stock car crew chiefs treated that movement as a tuning tool. Soft front springs and bump stops let the nose drop toward the racing surface on the straights and through the corner, the tail came up, and the car’s attitude changed lap after lap as fuel burned off and the tires wore.
That moving platform made the old cars hard to set up, but it also made them sensitive to the air around them. A car whose ride heights are always changing is a car whose grip can be upset.
The Next Gen, which arrived in 2022, went the other way. It has a flat underbody that feeds a rear diffuser, an independent rear suspension, and a long list of single-source parts that every team buys from the same supplier. A lot of its downforce comes from the underside of the car, and an underbody works best when it sits at a steady height. So the rules and the hardware keep the platform tightly controlled. The car is stable and consistent, and it’s very good at staying planted in clean air.
That’s the catch. If the leader’s grip comes from a platform that barely moves, a chasing car has fewer ways to disturb it. The leader stays in clean air, goes faster, and the gap grows until tire falloff, a caution or a pit cycle mixes things up. Hamlin’s “35 laps” comment describes that window. The racing he saw behind the leader was fine. “There was plenty of passing within the pack itself,” he said. The problem was the car out front.
What the O’Reilly car does differently
NASCAR’s second division became the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series in 2026, but the car is still old-school. It has a team-built steel tube chassis, a solid rear axle on truck arms, and 15-inch steel wheels with five lug nuts. Next to a Next Gen, it looks like a car from another era, and in engineering terms it is.
That older platform is the one where “jamming air” works. When a trailing car gets close to a leader’s rear bumper, it packs air against the back of the car in front. That takes grip off the leader’s rear tires, so the leader gets loose and has to lift, and the chaser gets a run. It’s an aerodynamic tool a driver can use to make a pass, not just wait for one. Hamlin’s point is that Cup drivers have mostly lost it. In the Next Gen, the car in front just doesn’t care as much about what’s behind it.
NASCAR isn’t going to bolt truck arms back onto the Cup car. But the comparison is useful because it says the goal isn’t more downforce or less downforce. It’s a car whose attitude moves enough that the air around it matters again.
Where the “unintended consequences” come in
Hamlin said rules would have to change, and that’s the easy part to picture. Letting the car pitch more means giving teams more freedom with springs, bump stops, ride heights or suspension travel, or changing the parts every team is required to use. Each of those choices runs into a reason the Next Gen was built the way it was.
- Cost. The single-source parts model was meant to stop teams from spending their way to speed. More setup freedom means more for engineers to chase, and the big teams have more engineers.
- Aero sensitivity. An underbody that moves around more can also gain or lose downforce suddenly. Done badly, that could make following worse at some tracks, which is the opposite of the goal.
- Safety. The Next Gen’s lift-off protection, including roof flaps, a diffuser flap and, for 2026, A-post flaps at every track, was developed around how the car sits today. Change how it sits and that work has to be checked again.
None of those concerns rules out a change. They do explain why NASCAR is working on this quietly instead of handing teams a memo on a Tuesday.
NASCAR’s recent changes have been small and careful
The best evidence of how NASCAR handles a change like this is the horsepower bump it made for this season. In October 2025, officials set a 750-horsepower target for 2026 at road courses and ovals shorter than 1.5 miles, up from 670, using a larger tapered spacer. They chose 750 partly for reliability, tested durability on engine dynamometers first, and decided against introducing it right before the playoffs.
John Probst, NASCAR’s executive vice president and chief racing development officer, explained it this way at the time: “It is a package. It’s the downforce, it’s the drag, it’s the power, it’s the tire wear, all together.” That’s the same thinking behind smaller adjustments like the half-inch spoiler trim at Talladega. Platform changes would be the next layer down.
One more line from that announcement stands out after Sunday. Probst said that “some of the best racing we have right now is at our intermediate tracks.” Charlotte is a 1.5-mile intermediate, and it ran the 670-horsepower setup because the power increase stops below that length. The race had plenty of action in the pack and a terrific finish, and it also had leaders who could drive away. Both things are true, and Hamlin is describing the second one.
What it means for Hamlin, and what to watch at Phoenix
Hamlin had his own reasons to be annoyed with Charlotte. He started 12th and moved to sixth early, then a tire from his team rolled into Connor Zilisch’s box during a stop. NASCAR penalized him for a pit-road safety violation and sent him to the rear. He scored no Stage 1 points, worked back to fifth by the finish, and left 49 points behind Kyle Larson after arriving 40 back. Bell is two points behind Hamlin, and Briscoe is 65 back after two straight wins.
In a 10-race Chase with no eliminations, those points carry all the way to the finale. With four races left, the stage points that rolling tire cost him matter as much as anything the car did. The run of 1.5-mile tracks in this Chase was supposed to favor Hamlin, which is why his criticism of how they race is worth taking seriously. He isn’t complaining about a track type he can’t figure out.
Next is Phoenix, which is on NASCAR’s 750-horsepower list. That makes it a decent test. If extra power and more wheelspin let chasing cars close on a leader, it’ll show up in the first 30-odd laps of each run, which is exactly the window Hamlin described. Our Freeway Insurance 500 preview covers the points picture going in.
For anything bigger, watch the calendar instead of the racetrack. NASCAR published its 2026 technical rule book updates in mid-November 2025. If a platform change for 2027 is far enough along, that’s the likely window for it to become public. Until then, the one thing that changed this week is that a championship contender has told fans, on the record, which part of the car NASCAR is working on.
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