Tony Stewart says NASCAR’s promise to cut costs of current Cup Series car hasn’t been delivered.
The Stewart-Haas Racing co-owner and three-time Cup Champion sat down for an interview with NBC Sports this week after SHR announced Josh Berry would replace the outgoing Kevin Harvick in the No. 4 car. Stewart touched on a number of issues in the interview and made it clear that teams are spending more on cars.
“It’s a financial risk for affiliates entering the sport now,” Stewart said. “It hasn’t gotten cheaper to run a NASCAR team the way this new car was developed. It costs us more money than ever to run these cars.”
The car, which NASCAR calls “NextGen,” was introduced in 2022 and will be built from specification parts supplied by an approved vendor list. One of the key selling points of the new car was the potential cost savings for teams as they would not be making as many parts in-house.
But the car has undergone significant changes since its inception, as NASCAR made changes to both improve safety – several drivers were injured in 2022 – and improve racing on short haul and street courses. Those changes cost money, although NASCAR said it would foot the bill for some safety-related changes ahead of this season.
Stewart also said that NASCAR “did a good job of trying to keep teams from going beyond the rule book” when it came to finding speed advantages with the current car. SHR driver Chase Briscoe received a 120 point penalty and the team was fined $250,000 in Charlotte earlier this season for a counterfeit part. After announcing the penalty, the team said the part on the car was a “quality control failure”.
Briscoe’s penalty is one of numerous large inspection penalties imposed throughout the season. Hendrick Motorsports received multiple penalties, while Kaulig Racing and Richard Childress Racing also received significant penalties.
Why are there so many penalties this season? Stewart, the 2002, 2005 and 2011 Cup champion, also pointed to the role he believes race betting plays in NASCAR’s actions and rulebook enforcement thanks to the changes introduced in the last 30 years have been made in the way races are conducted.
“It really boils down to one thing,” Stewart said. “They are a part of this sport, all of us have always been a part of this sport. It’s about control. Before we had timing lines in the pit lane, there were two people in the classification booth, each with a stopwatch.” hand. You can only control four out of 43 cars in the pit lane. If you pissed them off and pissed them off, you’d probably get a pit lane speed penalty next week. You could guarantee that. That was NASCAR’s way of keeping everyone under control.
“Now they have cornered the gambling site with greed. You cannot manipulate the race. You can’t ask someone for a speeding penalty in the pit lane if they didn’t commit the crime.” You can’t control that. You can’t issue false warnings to pack the field back together. …Then how do you control everyone if you’ve stripped them of that ability during the race? How do you do that? You do it at When the races are over, you go to the research and development center. If someone upsets you, they will take you there.
Warnings about debris have declined since NASCAR introduced stage racing in 2017 with two guaranteed warning flags per race. The legitimacy of some warnings about debris – particularly after a long stretch of green flag racing when cars were widely spaced on the track – was long met with skepticism by many in the 2010s.
Pit lane speed is now monitored via a series of timing lines and each track is equipped with a camera system to allow NASCAR to monitor each team for pit stop violations rather than solely relying on a pit lane officer to observe a pit stop .
And Stewart may have touched on the gambling aspect because NASCAR advocates betting on races. There are several NASCAR “authorized” gambling operators, and no sports series wants any indication of impropriety when legally wagering an event.
“So it shouldn’t be a surprise. … They’re going to find things that they’ve always done throughout the history of the sport and they have to oversee the sport,” Stewart continued. “You can’t blame them for that. Some of the ways they’ve tried to maintain balance and control, some of their decisions — the fans aren’t stupid, you people in the media aren’t stupid — it’s very clear how they do it.” They control it and try to keep everyone under control.
“I think it’s important that they keep aspects of it under control. You can’t lose control of it. If you do that, it becomes a battle against everyone, and then they’ve lost everything they’ve built up in 75 years.” . Some (of the penalties) I think have been exaggerated this year and gone way beyond that.”
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