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.
Anthony Damcott joined Frontstretch in March 2022. Currently, he is an editor and co-authors Fire on Fridays (Fridays); he is also the primary Truck Series reporter/writer and serves as an at-track reporter. He has also assisted with short track content and social media, among other duties he takes/has taken on for the site. In 2025, he became an official member of the National Motorsports Press Association. A proud West Virginia Wesleyan College alum from Akron, Ohio, Anthony is now a grad student. He is a theatre actor and fight coordinator in his free time.
You can keep up with Anthony by following @AnthonyDamcott on X.