The 2024 NASCAR season revealed a stark truth that’s making fans and teams alike sit up and take notice. What started as a promising era of competitive equality with the Next-Gen car has slowly transformed into a two-tier performance landscape. Rick Hendrick’s Hendrick Motorsports (HMS) is emerging as the undisputed king of the Chevrolet stable.

Just three years ago, the story was different. Teams like Richard Childress Racing (RCR) and Trackhouse Racing weren’t just participating—they were competing. We all remember the days when Ross Chastain would give the Hendrick drivers a run for their money, he won at COTA and Talladega in his very first year driving the #1 Chevy. Not to forget, he made the transfer to the championship race at Martinsville with the Hail-Melon. In 2023, he made it to the playoffs and bagged two wins again, but ever since then, he’s been struggling to compete for wins.

Now, it is important to note that Trackhouse Racing has a technical alliance with Richard Childress Racing and not Hendrick Motorsports. RCR is a big brother team, and ECR engines are powering the Trackhouse Chevrolets. And if you’ve noticed that, like Trackhouse Racing, RCR themselves are trying their best to recover from the slump. Kyle Busch was winless for the entirety of 2024, and let’s just not bring up how Austin Dillon won at Richmond, as it is of no significance.

The numbers tell a compelling story. While Chevrolet won half of the 36 points-paying Cup Series events last year, the wins are becoming increasingly centralised. Mid-tier Chevy teams like Spire Motorsports and Hyak Motorsports, which interestingly use HMS engines, are showing more competitive speed than traditional powerhouses like Trackhouse, Kaulig Racing, and RCR. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is a dominant figure on superspeedways, he won at Talladega. Not to forget, Carson Hocevar’s P2 finish at Atlanta this year, followed by Michael McDowell’s heroic run at Texas. This conversation grew louder when a fan on Reddit asked, “Why is there a significant speed discrepancy among Chevy drivers between Hendrick and ECR alinged teams?”

Speculation is running wild about the root cause. Is it simply HMS’s superior Research and Development (R&D) capabilities? The ageing Chevrolet Camaro body, which will continue racing in 2025 without modifications, might be playing a role. With Ford and Toyota introducing updated body styles, Chevrolet is riding on its past success, relying heavily on the technological infrastructure built by Rick Hendrick’s Hendrick Motorsports. The team’s massive investment in data analysis and performance optimization seems to be the key differentiator. But this has left other Chevy teams in a rough spot, and fans believe that non-HMS Chevy teams will continue to play catch-up unless they have the means and resources.

Two different stories for Chevy-backed NASCAR teams

Racing, like any high-stakes technological arena, is never truly about the initial hardware. It’s about what you do with the data. The Next-Gen car became a massive data collection exercise, with teams investing millions into understanding every nuanced performance metric. “The first year or so of the Next-Gen car was a great equalizer,” explained one long-time NASCAR fan. “No one had the complete data to exploit the car to its fullest. But the more races run, the more data collected, and teams with more money can hire more staff to analyze that data and fine-tune their setup packages.”

The financial disparity becomes starkly evident when you look at the investments made by top-tier teams. Rick Hendrick’s Hendrick Motorsports, for instance, didn’t just build faster cars—they built an entire data center specifically designed to churn through racing telemetry. “Hendrick invested literally millions of dollars into a data center to analyze every possible performance variable,” noted a team insider. This isn’t just about engine power anymore. It’s about finding improvements measured in hundredths of a second.

Fans haven’t missed this technological arms race. “Look at the historical context,” one passionate NASCAR enthusiast commented. “Teams like ECR (Earnhardt-Childress Racing) used to be at the forefront of innovation. But the major names in engine building—Danny Earnhardt, the Eurys, Doug Houston—they’ve all retired. Meanwhile, Hendrick has the same engine builders who’ve been perfecting their craft for 30 years.” The performance gap tells a compelling story. In 2022 and early 2023, Chevy teams like Trackhouse and RCR could genuinely compete with Hendrick Motorsports. Drivers like Chastain and Kyle Busch were regularly in victory contention. Fast forward to 2024, and the landscape looks dramatically different. “Lately, everyone outside of HMS seems to be lacking speed,” observed another fan. Even mid-tier Chevy teams using Hendrick engines, like Spire and Hyak, are showing more competitive performance than traditional powerhouses like RCR and Trackhouse.

This isn’t just about one team or one manufacturer. It’s a systemic issue that goes beyond engines. As one fan succinctly put it: “It’s not just horsepower. The bigger teams have the capital to invest in aero, suspension, driveline, and brake improvements. They’ll spend millions searching for a 5/100 of a second improvement per lap.” To put this in perspective, Formula 1 teams have reportedly had close to 200 engineers working solely on transmission efficiency. Now, RCR had to bend its knee against NASCAR to accept the charter deal, so spending millions on development isn’t a luxury they can afford. The Penske and Hendrick operations can survive thanks to their B2B support and business empire spread outside of NASCAR.

The fans’ verdict is clear: the Next-Gen car might have started as a promise of equality, but it has become a canvas for technological supremacy. Richard Childress Racing, once a benchmark of NASCAR excellence, now finds itself struggling to keep pace with the data-driven approach of teams like Hendrick Motorsports. As one fan bluntly summarised, “The haves will always find more speed than the have-nots—that’s just racing.”