One of the positives of NASCAR's Next Gen era, which was delayed from 2021 to 2022 due to the impact that COVID-19-related restrictions had on the 2020 calendar, has been the parity it has brought with it, the fact that so many different drivers on so many teams have the ability to win races, and not just the "wild card" superspeedway races.
But that's also seen as a negative, in some respect. The design of the cars is such that it's extremely hard for anybody to separate himself from the rest of the pack, and it has become challenging for the cream to truly rise to the top. The true skillsets of the top drivers aren't as easily put on display.
Richard Petty, a seven-time Cup Series champion and the winningest driver in the history of the series with 200 victories, believes that this is hurting the sport.
"We're really hurting, looking for somebody to break out of the crowd," Petty, who won 27 races, including 10 in a row, in 1967, recently told Forbes' Jim Clash. "We have no fox for all of the dogs to chase. It's a multitude of drivers racing against each other with no front-runner, nobody dominant, the first time in all of the transitions to different eras we have had this."
It's a fair point.
From 2017 to 2021, there was at least one driver each season with at least seven victories. From 2022 to 2025, no driver ever managed to win more than six races in a season.
But is this really the first time for such a phenomenon, or is this a classic case of looking at the past with nostalgia-colored glasses? And is it really hurting the sport?
From 2011 to 2016, for instance, only one season saw a driver reach seven wins, so while the parity may be at an all-time high right now, it's not completely accurate to say that this is the first time this has happened. Make note of the fact that the Gen 6 car debuted in 2013.
Sure, there is no more Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, or Jimmie Johnson running full-time. If you go back to 1958, the Cup Series had 63 consecutive seasons of an eventual seven-time champion competing in the series, and while you can never say never, it's highly unlikely that there will ever be another seven-time champion.
However, it's hard not to imagine that a lot of this criticism of parity is more skewed by the old "win and in", knockout playoff format then the actual Next Gen car.
NASCAR has more flaws than the Next Gen car
Hendrick Motorsports would be riding a streak of five consecutive championships, three by Kyle Larson alone, if not for the playoffs. They'd be four-for-four to start the Next Gen era.
That is the very definition of dominance that supposedly no longer exists, especially since Rick Hendrick has seen one of the team's drivers lead the series in total victories in four of those five years.
But the Championship 4 playoff format, which was introduced in 2014, effectively lessened the meaning of a championship down to getting hot at the right time. Only three drivers who won championships during the 12-year stretch from 2014 to 2025 won them in years that saw them actually led the series in total points.
In 2015, the champion missed 11 races. In 2018, two drivers combined to win 16 races, and neither won the championship. In 2020, two drivers again combined to win 16 races, and again neither won the championship; one didn't even get to the Championship 4.
In 2023, the driver who was 13th in the regular season standings won the title. In 2024, the driver who was 15th in the regular season standings won the title, after only qualifying for the playoffs via a five-overtime victory over the driver last in points – and only staying in contention because another driver was disqualified four weeks prior to the season finale.
And in 2025, the top point scorer of the entire postseason missed out on the Championship 4.
Let's also not forget the fact that Johnson's five-year run of winning championships from 2006 to 2010 certainly gave the dogs a fox to chase, and because none of them could catch him, NASCAR changed the entire format a few years later to lessen the chances of any kind of dynasty like that ever happening again.
Yet for what it's worth, Johnson only would have been champion twice during that stretch on points alone, if we assume everything else had remained the same.
Three-time champion Joey Logano is the active driver with the most championships to his name, yet he's never ended a season on top of the actual point standings throughout his entire career.
Sure, the Next Gen car has increased the level of parity within the Cup Series. But the idea that parity has never happened before is slightly altered by the fact that the past 12 seasons have given the series quite a few champions who have clearly not been the best drivers.
What also doesn't help is the fact that the points format, even with the new 15-point bonus for race winners, and even with the elimination of "win and in", is inherently flawed; it rewards consistency, rather than being consistently good, with just one point per position gained from second all the way through 36th.
And let's not forget the fact that the second place driver might not even finish in the top 10 in points scored for the entire race, thanks to the gimmick that is stage racing, the points awarded at the end of each stage, and the artificial caution flags that come with it to guarantee restarts, guaranteed stacked up fields, and many times lead to completely unnecessary, manufactured chaos.
Petty's point isn't necessarily wrong; in fact, when "The King" talks, you better listen. And no, he wasn't specifically singling out the advent of the Next Gen car and blaming it for the lack of a dominant driver; heck, his own race team won a race in 2022, after going more than eight seasons without a victory, when this new era began.
But seeing as how the whole "parity is ruining the sport" argument is largely based on the design of Gen 7 machine, it's worth taking a step back and looking at everything that has truly prevented a new fox from getting loose.
And it's also worth remembering that, in any new era of dominance, fans start to pine for the days of parity. Funny how that seems to work.