NASCAR sold the Next Gen car the way everyone wanted: cheaper parts, less development, a real chance for smaller teams to run up front. It sounded great on paper. Then the bills started coming in. Instead of saving money, teams found themselves spending more than ever on parts and repairs that cost a fortune.

And just like that, the car that was supposed to level the field quietly became one of the biggest money pits the sport has ever seen. Now, Michael Jordan’s 23XI Racing and Front Row Motorsports are putting those numbers front and center in court.

Next Gen promised savings, delivered pain

Court filings from the 23XI/Front Row antitrust lawsuit lay it out plain and ugly. In 2021, running the old Gen 6 car, 23XI spent about $2.8 million a year on car stuff. Switch to Next Gen, and that jumped to between $3.1 and $4.3 million every season from 2022 to 2024. That’s not a little bump; that’s hundreds of thousands extra just to keep the doors open.

Front Row Motorsports got hit even harder. Their cost per car sat around $2.9 million in 2021. By 2024, it had ballooned to $7.1 million. One mid-pack team almost tripled its yearly spend on the car itself, exactly the kind of team NASCAR swore the new model would help most.

Here’s why it hurts so bad. Teams can’t build anything anymore. Everything has to come from the same approved vendors at the same fixed price. Crash a quarter panel at Talladega? You’re writing a huge check to the only place allowed to sell you a new one.

Need a different setup for a short track? Too bad, the parts list is the parts list. Denny Hamlin put it perfectly: teams aren’t racing by being smarter or more creative anymore; they’re racing to see who can afford to keep buying the same expensive pieces as the big dogs.

The worst part? The on-track balance everyone hoped for never really showed up long-term. Sure, we get an occasional surprise winner, but look at the standings, and it’s still the usual suspects at the top. The rich teams still have the manpower, the simulators, the extra sets of tires, and now they also have the cash to eat the higher costs without blinking. Smaller teams are just trying to survive from weekend to weekend.

All of this is now Exhibit A in the lawsuit. If the judge looks at those skyrocketing budgets and decides NASCAR created a system where you have to overspend just to exist, the whole Next Gen experiment could be forced to change. There could be open suppliers, lower prices, maybe even real competition in the parts market.

What started as a promise to save money might end up costing NASCAR the way it does business. The scary thing is, none of this is new.

Bill Elliott saw this coming almost twenty years ago

Back in 2008, Bill Elliott was already waving the red flag. He watched Hendrick, Gibbs, Roush, and Childress win everything and told anyone who would listen: the big teams have the army.

“You may have a day in the sun and shine once or twice, but year in and year out, they’re going to kick your butt. They’ve got the manpower. You’re going to kill your people trying to keep up.”

He hated seeing legends like Bud Moore and Junior Johnson pushed out because they couldn’t match the spending. The Next Gen car was supposed to fix exactly that: lock the parts, shrink the budgets, give the little guy a fighting chance.

Instead, it just changed the game from “who can build the fastest car” to “who can write the biggest checks every week.” Trackhouse looked like the new kid on the block for a minute, but once the big teams figured out the new puzzle, the order went right back to normal.

Now Steve O’Donnell says NASCAR is studying ways to let teams tweak things again, maybe move away from single-source parts. That sounds nice until you remember Elliott’s warning: open the door to development, and the teams with the deepest pockets will just spend everyone else into the ground all over again. Damned if you lock it, damned if you open it.

From 23XI paying millions extra just to keep two cars on track to Front Row watching their budget almost triple, the Next Gen dream of affordability is looking more like a nightmare. And a Hall of Famer who saw the future in 2008 is probably sitting at home thinking, “Told you so.”