Sunday’s (May 11) NASCAR Cup Series race at Kansas Speedway was … fine. It wasn’t as bad a race as people are making out to be, but it certainly wasn’t a barn burner of any kind.
It was just … one of the NASCAR races of all time.
Of course, fans will try to make the race seem like it was boring because Kyle Larson opened a can of whoop-ass on the field, but for the most part, Larson was just in a league of his own.
That didn’t stop others from aggressively trying to make up spots to challenge him.
That precedent rang true about a quarter of the way into the final stage of a race. On lap 195 of the 267-lap endeavor, Brad Keselowski, continuing his 2025 season from hell, blew a tire and crashed while running second and quickly chasing down then-race leader Chase Elliott.
Cleanup for Keselowski’s crash concluded on lap 200, and drivers restarted once again on lap 201. They couldn’t even make it through turn 2 before the caution immediately came out again for a crash mid-pack. Ty Dillon slid up into Cody Ware, who spun in front of Daniel Suarez.
All three cars took major damage in the crash, and Suarez in particular was not happy with Dillon.
The field again restarted on lap 207. They made it about double the distance this time before Kyle Busch, who found himself on the bottom of four-wide, got knocked off the track and sent for a long lazy slide down the backstretch and into turn 3.
Sigh, caution again.
Lap 213 marked the next restart. You guessed it, the field once again couldn’t make it to turn 3 before a crash slowed the field for the fourth consecutive time.
This time, it was Corey Heim, making his 2025 Cup debut, who tapped Justin Haley ever so slightly and sent him into the wall with Erik Jones, collecting Bubba Wallace and Austin Dillon in the process.
If you’re keeping score at home, we ran roughly a combined lap and a half of green flag racing in about 25 laps. That’s … not ideal.
Fortunately, this was the final caution of the day, and the race ran the final 49 laps clean and green. However, it doesn’t change the fact that this was an abysmal sequence of events and something that we’ve seen before.
The phrase “cautions breed cautions” has been a long-standing phrase in NASCAR. Its meaning is self-explanatory — once a caution comes out, a plethora more will come out afterwards due to drivers’ inabilities to execute a clean restart.
But in the era of the Next Gen car, it gets old quick.
For years now, it seems like drivers are able to keep their heads until the final 100 miles of the race — when the pay window opens and everyone is all take and no give. In years past, that aggression didn’t come until really late in the race, because the car they drove had a lot more give — if you ran through somebody, you risked buckling your hood. If you doored someone going down the backstretch, the risk of cutting a tire or damaging your aerodynamics was much higher.
If the field got to a point where there was more pacing than racing, it felt like there was a sort of an unspoken gentleman’s agreement to get through the restart and ensuing laps cleanly so they all had a better shot at finishing the race before fighting for position.
With the Next Gen car, those worries are all but out the window. With such a rigid race car that allows for a lot more mistakes than before, the racecraft that once was is no longer.
On Monday (May 12), Busch appeared on Denny Hamlin’s podcast Actions Detrimental and summed up the racing best.
”We’re all clowns,” Busch said. “Every one of us. We all don’t know how to freaking drive. … It’s the composite bodies. That’s what it is. Everybody just runs into everybody and runs over everybody and hits everybody and hits the wall. Because we all just bank on the fact that the body’s just going to pop back out and we’re going to be fine.
”These clowns would not have any clue how to drive a steel body car. You touch the wall and it plows. Put them back in the Gen 4 cars.”
To which Hamlin agreed.
Busch has a point. The Next Gen car has allowed drivers to be a lot more careless with the moves they make because they know that they won’t suffer too many consequences unless they flat out crash.
That problem rears its ugly head toward the end of the race. Within the final 100 miles, drivers seem to lose their racecraft and intelligence all for the sake of gaining a position or two on restarts, not aided by the Next Gen’s ability to pass a few laps after a restart (or lack thereof).
So then contact happens, and cars crash and drivers are left unhappy — both those involved in the crash and the leaders who want to race for more than half a lap. Perhaps most importantly, it’s not fun for the fans who want to see cars screaming by them at 200 mph to consistently watch cars come back to the start-finish line at 70 mph four times in a row because someone racing for 20th tried to be a hero and grab a position while he could in turn 1.
To be fair, this is not an attack on any specific driver — it’s a reminder to the whole field that you have to race smarter. We all saw what happened in the NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Martinsville Speedway, when the entire field (including race winner Austin Hill) lost their heads — they ended up driving through each other, destroying equipment and hurting feelings. That’s not even mentioning the fact that they became a laughingstock for NASCAR that night.
Just because there’s a late-race restart, it doesn’t give drivers permission to bite off more than they can chew. Race aggressively, sure — that’s the whole point of racing — but don’t overstep just because the car will allow you to do so with minimal consequence.
Live to fight another lap.
i know at plate tracks, i’ve always said a switch goes off in the driver’s head with 50 to go and they forget where they are and just drive like they’re in rush hour traffic moving people out of the way.
i think stage racing has created this mentality. to do it every weekend, regardless of what type of track they’re on, proves to me that the autopilot switch comes off at the end.
It seems a multitude of things have converged to cause this, and unfortunately, it cheapens the sport. Though the dominant car/driver combo of this week did wind up prevailing, this often isn’t the case in today’s NASCAR. It seems it is more often determined by being good enough to be near the front, then either winning by dumping the leader, or managing to miss the wreck in front of you.
Contributing factors:
As the writer here noted, the durability of the car means casual contact isn’t as likely to result in a long day with a poor handling car.
As commenter Janice noted, stage racing packs the field together, creating temptation to snag a few spots on the restarts.
The current points system means winning a race essentially guarantees a spot in the playoffs, barring egregious antics like Austin Dillon’s stunt last year. Drivers act accordingly. I don’t blame them. Trying to get in on points alone is difficult, and even if one manages it, the lack of championship points means the team starts the playoffs in a hole. (I think this is the biggest problem. Drivers likely would think twice before throwing away a top 20 finishing position under the old points system.)
Top tier teams have the funding that destroying a car doesn’t matter much, and many of the drivers have never had to race on a budget. The cars are disposable.
The old adage of “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” has never been more true in our country, and NASCAR is not immune from this. Take Carson Hocevar as an example…he gets massive coverage within motorsports media, far outstripping what he and his team would receive if he just ran in the top 10 – 20 every week. That means more sponsors shown in his pictures, which increases his marketability.
Not sure how you fix all of that, but scrapping the silly points system would be a good start. But from NASCAR’s perspective, I get it. Many die hard fans will tune in, even if they don’t love the current product. But wrecks and drama get the sport into major sports media, and also draws clicks via social media, giving the sport exposure to possible new fans.
This phenomenon is not new, its been happening all through-out racing. I remember this being said when the last new car came out.
The number of cautions and stupid mistakes being made this year really seem to have increased. The Xfinity races have been an absolute joke, with only Talladega being a relatively clean race. The truck races have always been wreck fests, mainly because it’s made up of young drivers trying to make a name for themselves, and has beens trying to keep their career alive, but 3 cautions in the first 20 laps is even bad for the trucks. Even the Cup series couldn’t get through the the first 10 laps at Kansas without a caution. Admittedly it was for an engine failure, but a Cup engine that can’t last 10 laps is nothing for NASCAR or their teams to be proud of either. And why does it take 4-5-6 laps to go back to green when a car spins and there’s no contact?
Indy Car has proved who the real professional drivers are this year, going almost 4 full races without a caution. And the one caution they did have late at Indy was for a mechanical failure.
I’m not sure what changed in Indycar, because if I recall correctly, they were making a bunch of bone-headed moves and crashing more last year – it was almost like they were trying to emulate the NA$CAR drivers, forgetting they don’t have fenders and bumpers.
I am seriously enjoying how Indycar is racing this year. There are still some very aggressive moves being made, but they appear to be more calculated and executed well as opposed to desperate “Hail Mary” attempts so often seen in the past.