Getty Ryan Blaney on grid before race.
Quality racing on NASCAR Cup Series short tracks has been lacking since the Gen 7 car debuted in 2022. Drivers and fans have been understandably frustrated and vocal about the cars and their inability to pass on tracks that are the sport’s foundation.
Those frustrations and voices reached another level after the latest lackluster Martinsville race on April 7, which resulted in NASCAR’s Senior VP of Competition Elton Sawyer acknowledging during his April 9 appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that the previous focus on aerodynamic changes to the car had failed to produce the desired results and the governing body was open to exploring other areas.
Reigning Cup champion Ryan Blaney offered his thoughts on the subject when meeting with reporters before the April 14 race at Texas.
“We’ve tried taking the diffuser off. We tried different tires,” Blaney noted. “It hasn’t really seemed to move the needle a ton of like the direction we need to go at what made the other car really good at short tracks.
@Blaney admits he’s as frustrated as anyone else with the short-track issues and calls on NASCAR to make a “drastic” change.
“We just haven’t really been able to find that and I don’t know. I mean, it’s time for like drastic, drastic changes. And we thought the diffuser — taking it off was a drastic change, but it just wasn’t. I don’t know where you go from here. You have to maybe completely change the ride height of these cars, possibly. I don’t know. I’m not an engineer.
“I can just give you feedback on what I feel in the car and what I cannot do or can do when I’m racing around other guys. So it’s tough. Everyone wants it now. Wants more and more, better and better right now and I try to be realistic about these things like — well, it takes time, but it’s kind of getting to a time we got to get this better because gosh, I see people complaining about it, fans and the outside world complain about us like, ‘Hey, we dislike it as much as y’all. We don’t like it either.’
“It’s frustrating for us I think more when we can’t pass somebody or get within two car lengths of somebody at these short tracks.”
Ryan Blaney Followed Joey Logano’s Call for NASCAR to Act
Ryan Blaney is calling for a drastic change. The No. 12 pilot’s remarks line up with what his Penske teammate Joey Logano said during his April 9 appearance on SiriusXM.
🗣️ “We gotta swing the bat. We gotta do something big as a sport to fix it.”
2-time champion @joeylogano weighs in on the current state of short track racing in the #NASCAR Cup Series.
More with the @Team_Penske driver on the @siriusxm App 🎧
“It’s just crazy that that’s what it is right now,” he said. “We have to do something. My suggestion, the thing I think we should do is we need to get a smaller tire on this car and I know that we can’t do that with the wheels on all that. Groove the tire. Try something.
“In my mind, there ain’t much to lose. If we cannot produce tire wear — I don’t know how we can’t because we used to but for whatever reason that’s harder to do now. I don’t know why that is because we used to do it at Martinsville all the time.
“It’s pretty clear to me that NASCAR doesn’t want to give us more horsepower. I want that but does not seem like that is going to happen. So, do something and do it now. Hurry up. Do it now. Try it. At any point I think any of us would be willing to go test anywhere and do some crazy stuff and try it. We just got do something big now.”
Denny Hamlin Encouraged by NASCAR’s Response
Denny Hamlin is indisputably one of the most vocal drivers in the Cup garage. His “Actions Detrimental” podcast provides him with a platform to share his thoughts and he’s had plenty to say about issues on short tracks for months.
In Texas, the Joe Gibbs Racing driver was asked about the possibility of short tracks like Martinsville and Richmond losing one of their two dates in the future due to the decline in the quality of the racing product.
After months of calling for NASCAR to address concerns with short tracks, @dennyhamlin is encouraged by what he heard from officials this week following another lackluster race at Martinsville.
“Reminder, those are NASCAR-owned tracks,” Hamlin pointed out. “So they’re not going to want to leave their own racetracks to go somewhere else and have to pay money to go race somewhere or give up the date. So, I’m cautiously optimistic that that’s probably not going to happen, but we hope it doesn’t because I think short tracks are obviously a big part of what we do.
“And it’s why this week has been such an emphasis on getting some change. And it’s just really encouraging from my standpoint to hear NASCAR say that, okay, we recognize we do need a change. Part of the problem is recognizing you have a problem and they’ve done that. And so now we just go to work on it.”
What that work looks like isn’t really clear at this point. But everyone is holding out hope that whatever it is will work because the future of short-track racing is depending on it.