Kenny Sargent thinks NASCAR is trapped by its own commitments. The SpeedFreaks voice points to the 36-race season split across four broadcasters, a deal locked in until 2031, and says the sport has lost sight of what fans actually want.

The broadcasters expect a set number of races with a specific run time to honor that agreement. Sargent sees a sanctioning body caught between the contract it signed and the future it is trying to build. That is the divide.

“You can’t cut the races short; you can’t cut the season because you owe them all this g-damn inventory. You did it yourself, NASCAR. You did it yourself. When everybody wants shorter races, everybody wants a shorter season, everybody wants a better race car; everybody, even you do,” exclaimed Sargent on the latest SpeedFreaks live stream on YouTube.

Last Sunday’s Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway, for instance, had a total race broadcast time of 3 hours and 17 minutes, excluding traditional commercial broadcast time. If we factor that in, the number jumps to 3 hours and 38 minutes of total run time on air, which, according to the CEO of the 26-year-old SpeedFreaks brand, is too much.

The race itself saw Hendrick Motorsports’ William Byron dominate in what was a result dependent heavily on pit strategy, with only 11 lead changes among 6 drivers throughout the 500-lap course of the event. In contrast, the 2015 Cup Series spring race at ‘The Paperclip’ saw 31 lead changes among 13 different drivers.

While the length of the 2015 spring race at Martinsville has dropped from 500 laps to 400 for the current event, veteran Cup drivers such as Denny Hamlin, alongside Sargent, also made a case for NASCAR to consider shortening not just race distances, but the season itself.

“I just think there’s something to the oversaturation of the sport. If I ran it and I owned it, it would be a tough thing to swallow, to be willing to reduce my overall revenue and shrink it. But I truly believe that you’ve got to make the people miss it,” the JGR driver said. “I think you have to create a scarcity to the sport to get people really excited about the moment that it happens.”

However, with the broadcast deal set to go to 2031, this is where the network trap comes in. The NASCAR product that broadcasters FOX Sports, NBC, TNT Sports, and Amazon Prime Video share over a season cannot dramatically change, given the sanctioning body’s obligations that were set in a $7.7 billion agreement back in 2023.

“You’re in the hole for five more years with this contract, and then things are going to change,” Sargent added. “But are we going to stick around for that? When you have a guy like Cole Cusumano who lives and breathes this stuff, when he’s turning your TV off, that’s when you’ve got a freaking problem.”

Cusumano, who also appears regularly on SpeedFreaks, is a veteran NASCAR journalist and writer who has covered the sport for 10 years.

The seventh-generation Cup car, often referred to as the Next Gen car, is also partly to blame. There is no denying that NASCAR has had to continuously experiment with the platform to improve the quality of racing, especially at short tracks and superspeedways.

In a car initially deemed unsafe, with drivers like Kurt Busch ending their careers after crashing the car, the Next Gen has certainly taken some getting used to, not just for fans but for the drivers themselves.

Often touted as difficult to drive, with margins between drivers razor-thin, the car has suffered from issues such as difficulty in overtaking and promoting fuel-saving races at Talladega. While things have certainly improved since the Next Gen broke onto the scene in 2022, Sargent insisted that the broadcast deal is keeping NASCAR’s hands tied, and they are unable to take drastic measures.

All of this being said and done, another offseason rapidly approaches, with next weekend almost certainly crowning Kyle Larson as the 2026 Cup champ. Will there be any more significant attempts by the sanctioning body to improve their racing product as the fanbase evolves? It’s anyone’s guess.