NASCAR Next Gen Car: Specs, Parts and What It Changed
The NASCAR Next Gen car explained: the Cup Series spec chassis, its V8 and horsepower by track, single-lug wheels, and what the Gen 7 changed from 2022.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NASCAR24 min read
- First points race
- 2022 Daytona 500
- Engine
- 358 cu in pushrod V8
- Gearbox
- Five-speed sequential
- Wheels
- 18-inch, one center nut
The first time the public saw the car race in anger, it was on a quarter-mile track laid inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in February 2022, a football stadium with a temporary oval on the field. Joey Logano won the Clash. A few weeks later Austin Cindric won the Daytona 500 in the same kind of car, and stock car racing's top division had changed more in one winter than in the previous forty years.
The NASCAR Next Gen car is the seventh-generation Cup Series car, raced in points races since the 2022 Daytona 500. It is a spec car: the chassis, the wheels, the gearbox, the dampers and most of the body arrive from single approved suppliers, and every team buys the same parts. It carries a 358-cubic-inch pushrod V8, a five-speed sequential transaxle, independent rear suspension and 18-inch wheels held on by one center-locking nut. NASCAR set it at about 670 horsepower for most tracks and about 510 at the drafting superspeedways, then raised short tracks and road courses to roughly 750 for 2026. Everything below explains how those parts work and what they did to the sport.
What the Next Gen car is, and why it counts as Gen 7
Stock car fans number the eras of the Cup car the way railroad people number locomotives. The first generation, from the Strictly Stock season of 1949, really was stock: showroom sedans with the hubcaps taped. By the fourth generation, which arrived in 1981 with smaller cars, the bodies looked like production models only from twenty feet away. The Car of Tomorrow, the fifth, came in 2007 with a wing and a boxy profile drivers disliked. The Gen 6 of 2013 restored brand identity to the sheet metal and ran through 2021.
The Next Gen is the seventh, which is why the industry also calls it the Gen 7. It was meant to debut in 2021. The pandemic pushed it back a year.
What separates it from the six before it is not a single component but a business model. Earlier generations were defined by a rule book that told teams what they could build. The Next Gen is defined by a parts catalog that tells them what they must buy. NASCAR selected one supplier for each major system, those suppliers sell identical parts to every team, and a team's engineering staff spends its time assembling, measuring and setting up a car rather than inventing one.
That decision had three motives that NASCAR stated openly. The first was cost: a Gen 6 team kept a fleet of chassis tailored to short tracks, intermediate ovals, superspeedways and road courses, and ran a fabrication shop to maintain it. The second was relevance. The car's dimensions and styling were drawn to look more like the road cars Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota sell, and the 18-inch wheels and independent rear end were meant to put modern hardware under the body. The third, less often said aloud, was to attract new manufacturers by lowering the cost of entry. By the 2026 season, its fifth, the Cup Series still had the same three manufacturers it started with.
The car also brought NASCAR closer to the rest of world motorsport than it had ever been. A sequential gearbox, a transaxle, a rear diffuser and a center-lock wheel are routine in sports-car racing. Stock car racing had avoided all of them for decades, partly by tradition and partly because the old hardware was cheap and understood. Our wider explainer on how NASCAR's rules fit together covers the stages, the Chase and the charter system the car races under; this page stays with the machine.
Next Gen car specs: engine, horsepower targets and the 2026 increase
The engine is the one part of the car that each manufacturer still supplies for itself, and its basic architecture has not moved in a long time. It is a naturally aspirated V8 with a single camshaft in the block and pushrods working two valves per cylinder, limited to 358 cubic inches, or about 5.86 liters. Fuel injection replaced the carburetor in 2012, a decade before the Next Gen. Chevrolet's engines come from Hendrick Motorsports and ECR Engines, Ford's from Roush Yates, Toyota's from Toyota Racing Development.
Horsepower in NASCAR is a target, not a result. The engine could make a great deal more than the rule book allows. NASCAR controls output with a tapered spacer between the throttle body and the intake manifold, a plate with holes that restrict how much air the engine can breathe. A smaller opening means less power. The spacer size is published by track type, so the horsepower figure an announcer quotes is the number NASCAR has dialed the engines down to.
When the Next Gen arrived, the split was simple. Roughly 670 horsepower at almost every track, roughly 510 at the drafting tracks, where Atlanta joined Daytona and Talladega after its 2022 reprofile turned it into a pack-racing circuit. Drivers and fans argued from the first season that 670 was too little at the short tracks, where the cars spent too much of each lap off the throttle and too little of it able to pass. For 2026, NASCAR answered by raising the target from 670 to about 750 horsepower at ovals shorter than a mile and a half and at road courses. The larger ovals kept roughly 670. The superspeedway rules have been adjusted more than once since 2022, so the drafting-track figure is the one a reader should treat as most likely to move.
Weight, wheelbase and the dimensions that stayed
The wheelbase is 110 inches, the same as the Gen 6, which kept the car's basic proportions familiar on track. The rule book also sets a minimum weight, and the figure published for it varies between sources depending on whether the driver and fuel are counted, which is why this page does not quote one. The car sits lower and wider than its predecessor, with shorter overhangs, and the cockpit was moved slightly toward the center of the car for safety reasons covered further down.
Those numbers matter less than they did. On the Gen 6, a team found speed in where it put weight and how it shaped the chassis around it. On the Next Gen, most of that freedom is gone, and setup work happens within the adjustment ranges the single-source parts allow: spring rates, damper settings, ride heights, camber, and the like.
A modular steel chassis from a single supplier in North Carolina
Before 2022, a Cup chassis was a hand-welded steel tube frame that each team designed and built in its own shop, or bought from a larger team's shop under an alliance. Top organizations kept dozens of them. A car built for Martinsville did not race at Talladega. Fabricators bent, notched and welded tube to tolerances the team chose, then hung sheet metal over the result by hand.
The Next Gen chassis comes from one company, Technique Inc., in Concord, North Carolina. It is still a steel tube frame, but it is built in sections. A center section surrounds the driver and carries the roll cage. Bolted to it are a front clip, which carries the engine mounts and front suspension, and a rear clip, which carries the transaxle, fuel cell and rear suspension. Teams buy the pieces and assemble them, and they may repair but not redesign.
- Center sectionThe steel center section, roll cage and seat mounts arrive from the chassis supplier, built to one specification.
- Front and rear clipsThe front clip with engine mounts and front suspension, and the rear clip with the transaxle and rear suspension, bolt on.
- DrivetrainThe manufacturer's engine goes in at the front, linked by a driveshaft to the five-speed transaxle at the rear.
- Suspension and wheelsSingle-source dampers, uprights and hubs go on, then the center-lock wheels and tires.
- Body and underbodyComposite body panels, the splitter, the flat underbody and the rear diffuser are fitted to the frame.
- InspectionThe assembled car goes through NASCAR's optical scanning and measurement before it can take the track.
A simplified sequence. Teams buy every listed component from NASCAR's approved suppliers and are inspected against the rule book's tolerances at each stage.
The bolt-on clips changed the economics of a crash. A Gen 6 car with heavy front damage often went back to the fabrication shop for weeks or to the scrap pile. With the Next Gen, a team can unbolt a damaged clip and fit a new one. It cannot do that at the racetrack during an event, and a backup car still starts at the rear, but between races the repair is a parts swap.
The end of the track-specific car
The most consequential effect was one that does not show up on any specification sheet. Because every chassis is identical and must run at every type of track, the practice of building a fleet of purpose-built cars ended. A team now owns a smaller number of cars and reconfigures them, changing suspension settings, body parts and aerodynamic components to suit the venue. That is the single biggest reason the car cut the number of fabricators the sport employs, a point picked up later on.
| System | Single-source supplier |
|---|---|
| Chassis | Technique Inc. |
| Transaxle | Xtrac |
| Wheels | BBS |
| Dampers | Ohlins |
| Tires | Goodyear |
Goodyear had been NASCAR's sole tire supplier long before the Next Gen. The other four were new single-source arrangements that the car created, and they are why NASCAR talks about the car as a kit rather than a design.
Five gears in a transaxle, and a rear end that moves on its own
For half a century a stock car's gearbox sat right behind the engine, with a shift lever coming up through the floor beside the driver. The Gen 6 used a four-speed manual with an H-pattern. Drivers rarely shifted on ovals except on pit road and at restarts.
The Next Gen moved the gearbox to the back of the car and combined it with the differential in a single unit, a transaxle, built by Xtrac. It is a five-speed sequential: the driver pulls the lever back for an upshift and pushes it forward for a downshift, one gear at a time, with no gate to find. The lever still sits by the driver's right hand rather than on paddles behind the wheel. A driveshaft runs from the engine at the front to the transaxle at the rear.
Moving that mass rearward changed the car's weight balance and gave the designers room for the second big mechanical change. Every previous Cup car used a solid rear axle, a single beam linking both rear wheels, located on the Gen 6 by trailing arms of a type borrowed from pickup trucks. It was crude and durable, and an entire craft grew up around making it work, including the art of "rear steer," in which teams arranged the geometry so the axle turned slightly in a corner to help the car rotate.
The Next Gen uses independent rear suspension. Each rear wheel is located by its own control arms and moves on its own, as on a road car or a sports prototype. With it came single-source dampers from Ohlins, a far more limited set of adjustments than teams enjoyed before, and the end of rear steer as a setup tool.
What the sequential box did on ovals
Engineers expected the five-speed to be used mainly on road courses. The first season showed otherwise. At several ovals the gear ratios and the car's torque curve made it worthwhile to shift on corner exit, so drivers were downshifting into turns and upshifting out of them at tracks where nobody had shifted in years. Some drivers liked the extra tool. Others thought it took away something from the skill of managing wheelspin with the right foot. NASCAR adjusts gear ratios track by track, and has used that control in part to reduce shifting where it was making passing harder rather than easier.
Wheels, tires and the single nut that replaced five
The most visible change on pit road was the wheel. Every Cup car since the beginning had used a steel wheel bolted on by five lug nuts, and the Gen 6 wheel was 15 inches in diameter. The pit-stop craft was built around it: tire changers who could zip five nuts off in about a second and glue new ones to the wheel before it went on.
The Next Gen uses an 18-inch forged aluminum wheel from BBS, held on by a single large nut in the center, the system used across most of international racing. The tires are Goodyear Eagles to fit, with a lower sidewall than the old tires because the wheel is bigger while the overall diameter stayed similar. Lower sidewalls flex less, which sharpens the car's response and narrows the window in which a tire gives warning before it lets go.
- 18Wheel diameter in inches
- 1Wheel nuts per wheel
- 5Forward gears
- 110Wheelbase in inches
Specification figures that are fixed by NASCAR's rule book for every Cup car, regardless of manufacturer.
Bigger wheels made room for bigger brakes, which the Next Gen needed: it is heavy, it carries more grip on road courses than its predecessor, and NASCAR added street-course racing in Chicago from 2023. The brake rotors and calipers are larger than on the Gen 6, and teams choose among approved packages by track type.
What one nut did to the pit stop
A single nut changed the pit stop more than any rule in a generation. With five lug nuts, the tire changer's speed with the air gun was the bottleneck. With one, the rear-wheel changer, the tire carrier and the jackman have to move in a tighter sequence, and a stop is now often decided by how quickly a crew member can get around the car rather than how fast a gun spins. A loose wheel also became more dangerous: with one nut, a wheel that is not properly tightened can leave the car entirely. The penalty for that, and the crew-member suspensions that go with it, are laid out in our guide to NASCAR pit stop rules and crew limits.
The body: symmetrical panels, a splitter and a working underbody
Before the Next Gen, stock car bodies were largely sheet metal hung on the frame by each team, and teams spent decades looking for speed in asymmetry. Skewed bodies and rear ends set so the car went down the straightaway slightly sideways generated side force in the corners, and NASCAR spent years writing templates and scanning rules to rein it in.
The Next Gen body is made of composite panels, and it is symmetrical left to right. That one rule ended decades of skew. Panels are also designed to be replaced rather than repaired, so a dented door is changed between races rather than hammered back into shape. The front of the car carries a splitter, a flat shelf that projects ahead of the bumper and creates downforce by speeding up the air beneath the nose. The hood carries louvers that vent hot air from the engine bay, and the spoiler on the rear deck can be set at different heights by track package.
The less visible piece is underneath. Earlier stock cars had largely open undersides, with the frame rails and exhaust exposed to the airflow. The Next Gen has a full flat underbody running back to a rear diffuser, a set of upward-sloping channels under the tail that accelerate air beneath the car and pull it down onto the track. It was the first diffuser in Cup racing, and it produces a large share of the car's downforce. The physics is the same one Formula 1 relies on, covered in our explainer on ground effect and why a car's floor matters, applied with far less freedom.
Why the underbody made following harder
Downforce from the floor is less sensitive to turbulent air than downforce from a spoiler, which is why Formula 1 moved toward it in 2022. NASCAR's version did not fix the problem of following another car closely, though, because the Next Gen still makes a large portion of its grip from its bodywork and spoiler, and the car behind loses that in the leader's wake. The effect was clearest at short tracks, which is the subject of a later section.
What still separates a Chevrolet, a Ford and a Toyota
A spec car raises an obvious question. If the frame, the wheels and the floor are all the same, what is a Ford?
Three things. The first is the engine, which each manufacturer builds through its own program within NASCAR's limits on displacement, valve layout and airflow. The second is the styling of the nose and tail, along with some side detail, which each manufacturer draws to resemble a model it sells. When the Next Gen launched, the three were the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, the Ford Mustang and the Toyota Camry. Ford switched to a Mustang Dark Horse body for 2024, and Toyota introduced a new Camry XSE body the same year. Chevrolet kept racing its Camaro-based body after the road car ended production, dropped the Camaro name for plain ZL1 branding, and introduced a new ZL1 body for 2026.
The third is aerodynamic parity, which is where the politics live. NASCAR does not let the styling differences turn into performance differences. Each manufacturer's body is tested in a wind tunnel against NASCAR's targets for downforce and drag, and the shapes are adjusted until the three cars produce numbers within a narrow range of one another. The manufacturers submit their designs, NASCAR checks them, and an approved body is then locked.
| What a manufacturer controls | What it does not |
|---|---|
| Engine design within the rule book | Chassis and roll cage |
| Nose and tail styling | Wheels, hubs and center-lock nut |
| Some side detailing and graphics | Transaxle and gear ratios |
| Its engine-supply partners | Dampers and suspension geometry |
| Driver and engineering support to teams | Underbody and rear diffuser |
Where the brands still compete
The engine programs remain the largest battlefield. Fuel efficiency, durability across a full race weekend and drivability at the bottom of the rev range all differ even when peak power is held to the same target. Engineering support to the teams, simulation tools and data analysis count for a lot, too. When one manufacturer wins a long run of races, it is usually being outworked in those areas by the others, not out-designed in the body, because the body is the part NASCAR controls most tightly.
How fast is a NASCAR Cup car, and how it drives
Top speed depends almost entirely on the track and the horsepower target. At Daytona and Talladega, in the draft, Next Gen cars run close to 200 mph, and the cars in a pack go faster than any one of them alone. Our guide to drafting in NASCAR explains why the second car in line can go faster than the first. At the mile-and-a-half ovals the cars run well short of their drafting speeds, and at Martinsville, a half-mile paper clip, they spend more of each lap braking and turning than accelerating, so speeds there are far lower again.
None of this is the car's ceiling. The fastest official qualifying lap in Cup history is still Bill Elliott's 212.809 mph at Talladega in April 1987. Bobby Allison's crash in the race at that track a few days later, in which his car lifted into the catchfence, led NASCAR to require restrictor plates at Daytona and Talladega from 1988. The point of every speed rule since has been to keep the cars on the ground and short of 200 in the draft, not to see how fast they can go.
Steering and the narrower edge
The Gen 6 used a recirculating-ball steering box, an old design with a vague center and a lot of feedback through the wheel. The Next Gen uses rack-and-pinion steering, quicker and more precise. Combined with the lower-profile tires and the stiffer chassis, it gives a car that responds sharply and that drivers described in the first seasons as having a smaller margin between grip and a spin. The tire tells a driver less before it lets go. A car that slides is harder to catch.
What drivers said in the first seasons
Opinion moved fast. Early in 2022, drivers praised how close the field was and how the car rewarded precision at intermediate ovals. By late summer, veterans were raising questions about the parts and the safety of the car, with Kevin Harvick particularly direct after his car caught fire at Darlington in September 2022. Short-track criticism was nearly universal from 2023 onward. Younger drivers who had never raced the Gen 6 tended to have fewer complaints, which says something about how much of the reaction was comparison and how much was the car.
The short-track and road-course problem
Martinsville in the spring of 2022 told everyone the problem in one afternoon. Lead changes fell, the leader could rarely be passed without contact, and the cars that ran up front stayed there. Richmond and the smaller ovals looked similar. Drivers said the car was too hard to follow closely and that the tires did not wear enough to open strategy windows.
The causes were several and they compounded. More of the car's grip came from aerodynamics than on its predecessor, so the following car lost more in dirty air. The bigger brakes and better mechanical grip shortened braking zones, the place where short-track passes used to happen. Durable tires meant there was little fall-off in pace over a run. And with 670 horsepower, cars were rarely in danger of spinning their tires on corner exit, which took away the skill of throttle control.
NASCAR has responded in stages rather than with a single fix. A lower-downforce package for short tracks and road courses arrived in 2023, with a shorter rear spoiler and simplified diffuser parts to reduce how much the car leaned on aero. Goodyear brought softer compounds to several short tracks, and in some races an option tire alongside the primary, to create more wear and more strategy. The 2026 move to about 750 horsepower at tracks under a mile and a half and at road courses was the largest step, intended to make the rear tires work harder and to stretch the braking zones again. The way these packages differ from venue to venue is explained in our guide to NASCAR track types.
Road courses went the other way
The road courses were the better story. The sequential gearbox, the independent rear suspension, the bigger brakes and the center-lock wheels made the Next Gen a much better road-racing car than its predecessor, and the 2022 season produced first-time winners at the Circuit of the Americas, Sonoma and Road America. The street race in Chicago was possible only because the car could handle a tight, bumpy temporary circuit. It is a fair judgment that the Next Gen was designed more for those venues than for the short ovals that built NASCAR, and the sport has spent four seasons correcting the balance.
Safety revisions after the first season
The Next Gen was designed to be safer in side impacts, with the driver moved toward the center of the car and new energy-absorbing structures in the doors. In its first season, the trouble came from the ends.
Two concussions in 2022 forced the issue. Kurt Busch crashed backward into the wall during qualifying at Pocono in July 2022, suffered a concussion and did not race again full time. Alex Bowman was hurt in a rear-impact crash at Texas in September and missed several races. Drivers and medical staff pointed to the same thing: the rear of the car was too stiff. A Gen 6 car crumpled and absorbed energy in a hard rear hit. The Next Gen did not, and more of the impact went through to the driver.
For 2023, NASCAR revised the rear clip, the rear bumper structure and parts of the center section to soften the car in rear impacts, after crash testing and data analysis with its research partners. Further revisions followed to the front structure, as frontal hits showed similar stiffness. NASCAR's research teams carry accelerometer data from every incident, and the rule book has been amended several times since 2022 to change parts that crash data showed were transmitting too much force.
Heat in the cockpit and fires
The second complaint was heat. The Next Gen routes its exhaust out of the sides of the car ahead of the rear wheels, and the full underbody trapped heat beneath the floor and around the driver. Cockpit temperatures were punishing in the first summer. NASCAR added ventilation and changes to the floor and insulation to bring it down, with results drivers described as better but not solved.
Fires were the third issue, the one that provoked Harvick. Rubber, fluid and debris could collect in parts of the car that the exhaust heated. NASCAR made changes to the rocker panels and to the materials around the exhaust to reduce the risk. For 2026, NASCAR made a flap at the A-post mandatory at every race, a safeguard against cars lifting off the ground and flipping when they spin.
What the Next Gen did to competition and cost
The headline number came quickly. Nineteen different drivers won Cup races in 2022, matching the modern-era record, and the list included first-time winners such as Austin Cindric, Chase Briscoe, Ross Chastain, Daniel Suárez and Tyler Reddick. Smaller teams that had never been near victory lane under the Gen 6 suddenly won, because the gap in equipment between the richest teams and the rest had shrunk. Trackhouse Racing, a young team, won repeatedly in 2022.
Over time some of that spread closed again. The largest teams still have the most engineers, the most simulator time and the best data analysis, and those things matter more when everybody has the same parts. The car flattened the hardware gap more than it flattened the organizational one.
| Feature | Gen 6 (2013-2021) | Next Gen (2022 onward) |
|---|---|---|
| Chassis | Built by each team or its alliance | One supplier, modular clips |
| Body | Mostly sheet metal, hung by teams | Composite panels, symmetrical |
| Gearbox | Four-speed manual, H-pattern | Five-speed sequential transaxle |
| Rear suspension | Solid axle on trailing arms | Independent |
| Wheels | 15-inch steel, five lug nuts | 18-inch forged aluminum, one nut |
| Steering | Recirculating-ball box | Rack and pinion |
| Underside | Largely open | Flat underbody and rear diffuser |
Fewer fabricators, and a new class of penalty
The cost savings were real but smaller than first promised, and they came at a human cost. A team that no longer builds chassis does not need the fabricators who built them, and many lost their jobs in the shift, or moved to other series. Teams now spend instead on engineers and on parts, which are not cheap, and the price of single-source components has been a recurring point of dispute between team owners and NASCAR.
The car also created a new class of rule. When every team buys the same part, altering it becomes the most direct way to cheat, and NASCAR wrote penalties to match. The rule book now treats modification of a single-source part as one of the most serious offenses, and its gravest tier, which covers counterfeiting a single-source part, carries the heaviest points deductions, fines and suspensions in the rule book. The best-known case came early in 2023, when Hendrick Motorsports cars were penalized for modified hood louvers after Phoenix; the crew chiefs were suspended and fined, and the points penalties were rescinded on appeal while the other sanctions stood. The tiers and how they are applied are set out in our guide to NASCAR penalties and inspection.
The Garage 56 entry at Le Mans in 2023
The strangest race the Next Gen ever ran took place in France. The 24 Hours of Le Mans keeps a slot, Garage 56, for an experimental entry that does not fit any of its classes, and for the 2023 race, the event's centenary, NASCAR took it with a modified Next Gen Chevrolet Camaro ZL1. The project was a joint effort of NASCAR, Hendrick Motorsports, Chevrolet, Goodyear and IMSA, and the car carried No. 24.
The drivers were a deliberately mixed trio: Jimmie Johnson, a seven-time Cup champion; Jenson Button, the 2009 Formula 1 world champion; and Mike Rockenfeller, a former overall winner at Le Mans. The car was modified for endurance racing with headlights, a larger fuel cell, brakes built to survive a day of hard stops, and Goodyear tires developed for the race, wet-weather tires among them. The chassis, the transaxle and the basic engine architecture were Next Gen.
- SelectionThe race organizer accepted a NASCAR-backed Next Gen Camaro for the Garage 56 slot at the 2023 centenary race.
- ConversionHendrick Motorsports adapted the car with lights, a bigger fuel cell, endurance brakes and Goodyear endurance tires.
- TestingThe car ran long endurance tests on American road courses before it was shipped to France.
- Race weekJohnson, Button and Rockenfeller qualified the Camaro and ran it among the GT cars through the night.
- ResultThe car reached the finish of the 24 Hours and was classified 39th overall after a mechanical problem cost it time in the pits.
A summary of the publicly described steps of the Garage 56 project; it does not cover the engineering detail, which the partners did not fully publish.
What the experiment proved
The result was modest and the point was not. A Cup car designed for ovals completed the most demanding endurance race in the world, and its lap times put it in the company of the GT cars rather than adrift of them. The engineering lessons on brakes, cooling and tires went back into the Cup program. For the sport's own image, a stock car on the Mulsanne Straight on live television in Europe did more than any marketing campaign. Our guide to Le Mans Hypercar rules explains the classes it shared the track with, and the Rolex 24 at Daytona shows the American endurance race where several of the same machines compete.
The Next Gen was not built for that. The fact that it could do it is the clearest sign of how far the Cup car moved from its stock origins, and how much closer it now sits to the cars in the rest of motorsport.