Denny Hamlin has never been vocal about his reservations on NASCAR’s newest creation – the Next Gen race car. With parity racing, the field is bunched up closer than ever, and it’s tough for the teams to find the split-second advantage on the racetrack. This scenario is evident on a track like Darlington Raceway, where the rest of the field was trying to play catch-up to William Byron as he swept both stages, leading 243 laps. It was just tough for his rivals to make up the ground until a caution forced the teams into strategy calls.

Now, the No. 11 team is no stranger to making the most of these lucky breaks. Last year, they brought their A-game at Richmond Raceway which helped Hamlin jump two positions and take the lead and race win against Martin Truex Jr., and similar scenes unfolded last Sunday at Darlington. With Kyle Larson crashing into the wall once again with 4 to go, Ryan Blaney and the rest of the competitors opted for fresh Goodyear rubber. The next thing you know, Hamlin jumped from 4th to lead to start the last two-lap shootout and bag his second consecutive race win of 2025. “There’s two people I really love right now: my pit crew and Kyle Larson,” Hamlin said after the race.

His #11 team currently leads the entire grid in 4-tire pit stop time, averaging just 9.650 seconds per stop—0.322 seconds ahead of second-place Noah Gragson. Those fractions of seconds have translated directly to Denny Hamlin’s recent success, including his 56th career Cup Series victory at Darlington, moving him past Rusty Wallace for 11th on the all-time wins list. Although Hamlin heaped praises on his pit crew team after the win, he couldn’t help but highlight how the Next Gen car produces scenarios where luck sometimes outweighs the best-running race car.

“Things have just gotten closer and closer,” Hamlin explained when asked about the evolution of Next-Gen pit stops. “The cars as we go to these race tracks, this is probably the 8th or 9th time that we’ve been at a NextGen car at Darlington.” This repeated exposure has fundamentally transformed the competitive landscape in ways few anticipated when the car debuted in 2022. What was once a field spread across seconds has compressed into a battle of milliseconds and execution.

“The field continues to get tighter and tighter,” Hamlin explained on the Kevin Harvick’s podcast. “The drivers morph their styles closer and closer together, which is why you see the lap time so close between like first and 20th.” This compression of competition represents a fundamental shift since the Next-Gen car’s introduction in 2022. With standardized single-source parts equalizing much of the mechanical advantage teams previously exploited, races are increasingly decided by execution rather than equipment. Denny Hamlin’s fear emerges from a new reality: execution has become everything. “It’s the margins in which you got to make up the difference. And that’s, do you execute? Do you have a clean green race where you don’t make a mistake as a driver? Do you execute on pit road when you have to?”

Hamlin’s biggest fear emerges from this new reality: the razor-thin margins that leave no room for error. “If you’re on pit road for a total of 40 seconds, the pit crew is responsible for about 9 of it, and you’re responsible for the other part.” This pressure point has become Hamlin’s obsession—knowing that even the slightest misstep from his pit crew could erase hours of preparation and flawless driving. The 2022 introduction of the single-center lug instead of five-lug nuts, combined with the increased fuel cell capacity (approximately 20 gallons, up 8% from previous iterations), has completely transformed pit road dynamics. So much so that the teams are targeting to push the pit stop time to the 8-second mark and reduce the time on pit road.

In fact, Hamlin wasn’t content with the way he won and demanded more speed from his No. 11 Camry. “There hasn’t been a lot of dominating. Don’t get offended when I debrief and say that we probably had an eighth-place car.” If we are to take out Christopher Bell’s Phoenix run and Hamlin’s Martinsville domination, the other three wins have come because they were lucky. A lucky caution, overtime restarts and late race chaos have contributed to JGR’s splendid run so far.

Well, it’s not just the on-track racing product of the Next Gen race car that has got Hamlin worried. The JGR star, who also serves as a team owner at 23XI Racing, explained how this new invention is going to add more financial stress on the race teams.

Denny Hamlin Exposes NASCAR’s Unfulfilled Promise as New Tariffs Threaten Teams

While Hamlin celebrates his pit crew’s excellence on track, he’s sounding an alarm about a growing crisis off it. The Next-Gen car, introduced in 2022 with promises of cost reduction through standardized parts and single-source suppliers, has according to Hamlin failed to deliver on its economic promises. “The cost of Next Gen itself has gotten so high in general,” Hamlin recently acknowledged when asked about financial concerns. This stark assessment directly contradicts NASCAR’s original selling point that the new platform would make racing more economically sustainable.

The situation is now compounded by newly implemented 25% US tariffs affecting international parts suppliers. “There’s vendors that are saying that they’re going to have to raise their prices,” Hamlin explained. “I’m sure it would fall—it’s going to fall on the teams like you would think.” This financial pressure comes at a particularly challenging time, as the Next-Gen car relies on 26 single-source suppliers for critical components, including UK-based AP Racing for brake systems—exactly the type of international supply chain relationships now threatened by increased tariffs.

NASCAR Commissioner Steve Phelps has admitted uncertainty about how these tariffs might affect teams sourcing parts, stating on NASCAR’s Hauler Talk podcast: “It’s something that we are obviously going to watch very closely… It’s an unknown.” Even powerhouse team owner Rick Hendrick is reportedly monitoring tariff impacts “on a daily basis.” With Sports Business Journal previously reporting that even a legacy team like Hendrick Motorsports hasn’t turned a profit in the last 10 years, the situation appears particularly dire for smaller operations—precisely the teams the Next Gen car was supposed to help.