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Fresh off of his win in Texas, Chase Elliott was asked in a press conference ahead of the race in Talladega if he saw more parity in NASCAR's future with the Next Gen car. This was considering that in the first two years of the new car, there were several different winners.
However, nine races into the 2024 season, Hendrick Motorsports have recorded five wins, while Joe Gibbs Racing have three. This suggests that the idea of parity on the grid hasn't come to the fore this year.
When questioned about the same, Chase Elliott simply stated that the bigger teams with resources will find a way to gain an advantage in motorsports. He said (via Speedway Digest):
"I just think it’s silly that we think that we’re going to keep the big teams and that type of power away from winning in the long haul. I think that’s just motorsports. The big teams and the resources behind them are always going to find the advantage, and whatever it is, no matter how small the advantage is or isn’t, I think that it’s always going to be extracted and extracted first by those groups."
Having said this, Elliott admitted that they are fighting for "smaller increments" more now than ever before. However, teams still search for the smaller details in order to get ahead of their competition, an area in which Elliott believes the big teams will more often than not be ahead of the rest.
Chase Elliott gives his view on why there were more winners in Next Gen's first year
In it's first year which was 2022, the Next Gen car saw 19 different winners across 36 races with five first-time winnners. Less than two years since that, however, the big teams are once again dominating.
So what was it about that first Next Gen season that saw that many winners and that led to that much parity in the field?
Chase Elliott believes that in the first year, nobody knew what was right and what was wrong. He feels there were several "different paths" and opportunities to find success.
"You might back into a little bit of success not knowing what you didn’t know at that point in time, but everybody has been learning this car for a couple of years now," Chase Elliott claimed (via the same source).
He added that everyone is learning what makes the Next Gen car go fast, and from there, there will be results similar to before the Next Gen era.
