“There are many things that Next Gen will do for us as a sport when it rolls out in 2022. The styling is going to be amazing. I think the racing is going to be better based on the aerodynamics of the vehicle.” This is what NASCAR President Steve Phelps said about the Next Gen car at a press release in 2021.

It’s true, the high expectations with the new car that NASCAR has created cannot be overstated. The car has been reimagined and redesigned from every possible angle, resulting in only the seat being the one common thing between the Next Gen and the Gen 6.

Be it the engine configurations, the wheels, the transmission, the body, the wings, it’s all new and all with one goal in mind – better racing.

But while most fans associate ‘better racing’ with ‘faster cars’, it’s worth exploring whether the Next Gen cars are faster than the Gen 6 cars or not. After all, we’ve already seen them in action in several tests, including the most recent one in Daytona, where we got close to race-like conditions.

New cars in NASCAR – faster or slower than before?

In last year’s Daytona 500, Alex Bowman won the pole with a top speed of 191.2 mph while there were eight other drivers in the qualifying that ran over 190 mph.

And in the most recent testing at Daytona in January 2022, 195 mph was the top speed that Austin Cindric hit during the draft. As for outside the draft, the top speeds hovered around the mark of 184 mph.

These are more or less the same speeds we saw in the September 2021 testing. And as the teams will develop the cars more leading up to the race week, it’s unlikely that we’ll see a massive increase in speed than what we saw now or what we saw last year.

So the speed could increase by the time we go racing in Daytona 500, but it won’t increase significantly.

This is something we all need to understand and accept, that the Next Gen car doesn’t promise faster cars or faster racing, but closer racing, more competitive racing, something which is good for the sport.

And in that objective, among the others, it should hopefully succeed.

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