After an extended malaise and interval of decline led to adjustments in management, the previous a number of years have seen NASCAR go from dealing with the challenges of its future from a place of weak spot to ambitiously pursuing tomorrow from a place of power. At the forefront of inventory automobile racing’s turnaround and re-imagining have been NASCAR president Steve Phelps and chief working officer Steve O’Donnell, each of whom addressed the media within the annual State of the Sport press convention at Phoenix Raceway on Friday.

While there may be nonetheless loads that NASCAR has to enhance on and nonetheless seeks to perform, a lot has modified since Phelps was promoted to NASCAR president in 2018 to spearhead the game’s renaissance. The Next Gen automobile, one of many sanctioning physique’s most formidable initiatives, is now ending its first full season of competitors. And that first full season has been a particularly aggressive and compelling one, which has helped a altering sport develop once more after years of stagnation.

“Thrilled for where this sport is. Thrilled for where the sport is going as we head into our media rights negotiation next year, as we head into kind of unchartered territories,” Phelps mentioned . “… We are going to continue to be bold and we’re going to continue to be innovative.”

Here are a few of the notable matters mentioned throughout Phelps and O’Donnell’s joint press convention, which was headlined by a number of matters pertaining to competitors.

Next Gen Safety

In the total 20 years since a security revolution following the dying of Dale Earnhardt, NASCAR’s observe report on security had been impeccable and nearly unimpeachable. But the 2022 season introduced the risks of racing again to the forefront, significantly within the second half of the season. The Next Gen automobile proved to be a lot too stiff in sure impacts, resulting in a spate of concussion points — together with one suffered by Kurt Busch in a crash at Pocono that ended his season as well as his full-time Cup career.

Competitor anxiousness boiled over into outrage by the autumn after two completely different accidents at Texas Motor Speedway, however these have since been assuaged by common conferences between NASCAR and its rivals on security and different competitors points. Still, making modifications to the Next Gen automobile from a security standpoint is an ongoing course of — with NASCAR seemingly having constructed a automobile sturdy sufficient to guard the motive force in the occasion of a catastrophic accident (corresponding to Ryan Newman’s crash within the 2020 Daytona 500 that noticed an intrusion into his cockpit), the main focus is now on making drivers take much less bodily punishment in additional minor crashes the place points have been seen this season.

“What we’re learning is those smaller hits, which we’ve never seen before in terms of a car that we’ve raced, are the ones we really need to concentrate on,” O’Donnell mentioned. “That’s why you are seeing the tweaks being made to the clip, for these smaller impacts, even a bump on a restart, these varieties of issues.

“It’s not just the car. I think the dialogue we’ve had with the teams now involves how are you fitting in your seat, helmets, foam head surround. All those things are part of this dialogue, which is really, really good. We’re seeing some improvements on a daily basis as we look towards 2023.”

Next Gen Tweaks and Technology

One of the most important factors of emphasis in creating the Next Gen automobile was to create a greater racing product on intermediate tracks, and NASCAR has seemingly achieved that mission. Races on mile-and-a-half and comparable tracks have been among the many better of the 2022 season, however that is considerably come on the expense of the racing product on quick tracks and street programs, the place passing has turn out to be harder than within the earlier technology of Cup automobile.

While O’Donnell famous that the pattern measurement for such tracks continues to be comparatively small, he did notice that aerodynamic and probably horsepower adjustments are on the way in which for these tracks, together with some classes realized from the Garage 56 Le Mans program that could possibly be carried out.

“We have a lot of dialogue going on with the drivers in terms of potentially looking at some power things — I think that’s a little more complicated,” O’Donnell mentioned. “There are some things we’ve looked at even through Garage 56 that we found from an aero standpoint that could be put in place as early as next year for both short tracks and road courses.”

Beyond the Next Gen automobile itself, NASCAR can also be transferring ahead with plans to combine new automotive applied sciences, together with electrification. O’Donnell hinted that extra information on the event of a possible electrical automobile and racing collection might are available 2023, with a goal of 2024 for on-track implementation.

“The ideal world for NASCAR is you can show up at a racetrack and you can see any form of motorsports you want, any type of power: Electric, hydrogen,” O’Donnell mentioned. “You want to see some loud engines going out there, that’s NASCAR too. All that is going on behind the scenes.”

A big a part of such expertise could be participation among the many sport’s OEMs, which presently embody Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota. While NASCAR has been enthusiastic about bringing extra OEMs into the game, O’Donnell mentioned that there was no information on that entrance past ongoing dialogue with potential automakers.

The Charter System

While driver contentions in regards to the Next Gen automobile occupied a lot of NASCAR’s consideration throughout the fall, one other brushfire emerged when a number of crew executives went to the media to air their grievances over a lack of progress that has been made in negotiations with the sanctioning physique over how a lot of the income break up they’ll obtain in NASCAR’s subsequent media rights deal. The behind-the-scenes dispute spilling into the general public eye was the newest growth in an ongoing, long-term strategy of reforming the game’s enterprise mannequin to be able to make race groups much less reliant on sponsorship {dollars} and fewer liable to function at a loss.

One main step towards that’s the constitution mannequin, the franchising mannequin launched by NASCAR in 2016 to offer chartered groups assured entry into every race, two items of income (fastened income after which income competed for), and governance within the sport. The present constitution settlement is up on the finish of 2024, however Phelps indicated that NASCAR would search to resume the settlement believing it has helped the game — even because it has created an entry barrier for potential new house owners.

“I would say the charter system, although not perfect, has worked really well,” Phelps mentioned. “You look at the enterprise value, which I’m not going to get into what charters are going for, what they were at, but the number right now is a significant multiple of what it was three years ago. We have people out there that want to get charters who are both in the sport and are outside of the sport that can’t get them right now because the teams are holding them. That’s their right. Whether we want that to happen or not, there’s nothing we can do about that.

“… Do I feel we’ll lengthen the charters? I do. Do I feel it is a good factor for the game? I do.”

Officiating Obstacles

Officiating a NASCAR race is way from a simple activity, because the live-action tempo of races dictates that main selections and judgment calls have to be made in actual time as a substitute of dissected and reviewed throughout a stoppage in motion. Naturally, this generally results in uneven officiating selections, a few of which have been made this season after which subsequently corrected after the very fact — most notably at Texas in September, when NASCAR officers admitted they missed a name on William Byron deliberately spinning out Denny Hamlin beneath warning.

O’Donnell considerably owned as much as such errors, and he then mentioned the function of improved expertise in ensuring such conditions don’t occur sooner or later.

“If we are missing a camera angle, that’s on us to fix and make sure we are those things in place,” O’Donnell mentioned. “If you take Texas, for instance, one of the angles we should have had in race control, we didn’t. Next week we did. We have every single in-car where we were able to see it.

“We’ll return and ensure the place will we make errors, what expertise do we have to actually make these selections in a extra well timed style as a result of we need to make these on the racetrack versus throughout the week.”

Another stir was created this weekend when NASCAR selected to not penalize Xfinity Series driver Austin Hill after he punched fellow driver Myatt Snider on pit street following final Saturday’s race at Martinsville Speedway. While O’Donnell mentioned that Hill’s actions crossed the road, he mentioned that NASCAR elected to not act on condition that they’d not issued penalties for comparable conditions earlier within the 12 months.

O’Donnell then intimated that potential rule adjustments on that entrance within the identify of consistency could be in retailer for subsequent season.

“Our job in the offseason will be to talk to the drivers, get their feedback on where should that line be,” O’Donnell mentioned. “Still up to us to make the decision, but I think you’ll see some more consistency in terms of what we may do and react to what happened last week with a penalty of some kind for 2023.”