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NASCAR – Richmond Raceway
Sunday, April 2nd – 3:30 p.m. EST – FOX
NASCAR’s Next Gen car has proven itself on plate tracks, multiple types of intermediate ovals, flat 1-milers, road courses, and two brand new track layouts to the series. Of the significant track types to stock car racing, that leaves just NASCAR’s traditional slate of short tracks to solve. This weekend at Richmond, we get our first look at that final step. If the car can race well here, the on-track product will have officially either improved or stayed constant everywhere.
Richmond is a flat 3/4 mile short track with a trioval. That makes it a strange short track, one that skews slightly closer to the flat miles at New Hampshire and Phoenix than the bullrings at Bristol and Martinsville, but that half-measure layout makes it a good test. We’ve already seen this car succeed at the L.A. Coliseum quarter mile, an even smaller track than any on the championship schedule, so this should combine with that to give a full picture of the car’s short track abilities.
Six races into the car’s first season, the major shock has been the younger generation of drivers fighting for wins on a weekly basis. Ross Chastain, last weekend’s first time winner, was the third to win their first race in six races with the new car. Nobody 30 or older has won a race and, of the six drivers who have won races in 2022, only Kyle Larson has double-digit career wins. As drivers struggle to get a grip on a new sort of car, Chastain is the only driver in the field with more than two top fives.
Tyler Reddick seems to be up next. Reddick has two top five finishes and has been knocked out of the top five late two more times, making him one of the strongest performers in the new car regardless of track. He also has no wins through two years of full-time Cup racing. A victory Sunday would go a long way toward cementing his long-term place in NASCAR, but he’ll have to beat out a full field of veterans yet to win a race in the new car to do it.
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