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For the most part, the Next-Gen car has been kind to Hendrick Motorsports.
The seventh-generation NASCAR Cup Series ride, implemented prior to the 2022 season, has now been in use for three full seasons and though several rule changes, tire tweaks and updates have kept the field on their toes, a fair sample size of data now exists.
Nobody in the sport has been better in terms of wins than Hendrick Motorsports teammates Kyle Larson and William Byron when it comes to the current car. Larson’s 13 victories rank first with Byron just behind with 11. The two have combined to lead 5,581 laps with Larson ranking first in the category (3,461) and Byron fourth (2,120).
Larson also leads in top-five finishes (43) and average starting position (ninth). But as successful as he’s been in the Gen-7, he admits adapting to it has, and will continue to be, a process.
I would say in 2022, the first year (with) the Next-Gen car, we were kind of off a little bit then and won one race early in the year, but then it took a long time to win another,” Larson said in a recent interview with HendrickMotorsports.com. “But I feel like we learned a lot in that first season and 2023 we were really strong, really fast … crashed a lot, but ran up front a lot too. So, I feel like in 2024, we cleaned a lot of the mistakes up, a lot less speeding at road. Although I still crash a lot, it was less. We were able to kind of put more the length of a race together than the early portions of a race like we did in 2023 and then, crash.”
“So, you always want to clean up, all those areas still. So, next year I would love to crash even less and lead more laps, win more races, win more stages. But I understand that’s really tough to do. I felt like we did a great job in the Next-Gen era for this year probably, I haven’t looked at stats of other top guys from the years past, but six wins, led a ton of laps, won a ton of stages – I don’t know if anybody else had a season like that yet in the Next-Gen era. So, you just want to keep building on that and keep executing.”
Byron believes that even in the fourth year of the Gen-7, things will continue to evolve and not only on the race track.
One of the goals with the car was to create more competitive speeds throughout the field and ultimately, more parity when it comes to race winners. That’s certainly panned out, at least to a certain extent, with 27 drivers having visited victory lane over the last three years.
