Charlotte Motor Speedway’s oval surface was last repaved in 2006. Since then, the track has developed a lot of character, and that has often been the reason for the kind of racing one gets to see there in North Carolina.
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That same character has led to parts of the oval being bumpy, something Kyle Larson complained about before the race when he said it would have helped to have practice. Bumpy tracks often go against the very philosophy that the Gen-7 cars were built on, which Hendrick Motorsport’s vice-president of competitions, Chad Knaus, explained better than most could.
“These cars, they just ride rough. We have to really get the cars low to the ground to really power up the diffuser and get the underbody downforce working properly,” Knaus told Noah Reed from Kenny Wallace Media. “So the cars are bouncing off the internal stops and shocks a lot. They’re hitting on the racetrack an awful lot. And the track’s just developing character after the last time they did some service work on the facility.
“So it’s going to continue to get rougher, but that’s always a good thing, quite honestly. It’s good for the drivers. They have to learn how to navigate that and move around. And it’s more work, and it’s more difficult for the teams to get the handling correct.”
The Gen-7 car’s entire philosophy is that it runs best when there is heavy downforce, meaning when the car is running closer to the ground. That same philosophy also applied to Las Vegas, which hasn’t been repaved since 2007.
Knaus, who served as Jimmie Johnson’s crew chief right through his seven Cup championship wins, believed that it’s good that it’s going to get rougher. That is because Knaus and Johnson ran in NASCAR in an era when they could always make a lot of changes to their car, but in theory, there isn’t a lot of change on the Gen-7 car apart from race strategy and balance.
Knaus believes that running low on such rough surfaces will push teams to come up with better solutions. Why? Because the underbody has so many working parts that need to work perfectly in order to keep the car in the optimal aerodynamic setup, teams will need to play around with their setup and come up with ingenious methods to ensure their cars stick to the ground while also being safe from hitting a bump and breaking a splitter or something along those lines.
That presents a challenge for the modern generation of drivers that Knaus and Johnson were all too used to tackling. And that creativity is often what makes motorsports intriguing. Despite the bumps, the two HMS Chevrolets that made it to the very end built up very good races, and Knaus was pleased to see that.
“I feel really proud for those guys,” Knaus said. “They’ve done a great job. Everybody at Hendrick Motorsports is working super hard, obviously. I think all four of our cars had reasonable speed today. It’s unfortunate that we had a couple taken out early on in the event, but the nine ran strong. Came back from a penalty on pit road and a couple of mishaps on pit road and still was able to finish in the top 15.
“So really proud of that effort. And the five, they keep staying out of trouble and getting stage points and getting good finishes at the end of the race. And that’s what’s going to be the determining factor when we get to the end of this thing.”
It was Alex Bowman and William Byron who had early DNFs on lap 77 after Bowman made an overcorrection when his car got loose, slamming first into 23XI Racing’s Bubba Wallace, before also taking out Byron. But the real story of HMS was that Larson was able to come away from Charlotte in the lead.
Despite finishing down in 6th, bringing an end to his remarkable streak of top-five finishes in all Chase races, Larson went home with 49 points on the back of winning Stage 1. He finished behind Denny Hamlin yet leads the Joe Gibbs Racing veteran by 49 points with four races to go.
As the season comes closer to the end, the battle is getting closer; Larson now has three JGR drivers within one win of him, and Chase Briscoe winning back-to-back races means Larson and his crew chief are no longer looking to just defend their lead but build it into one that can secure them a third NASCAR Cup Series crown.