Denny Hamlin agrees with Kyle Busch about Next Gen car: ‘He’s so right’

Kyle Busch wasn’t happy after Sunday’s GEICO 500 at Talladega Superspeedway, taking to X to air his frustrations with the Next Gen car.

Busch, who jumped out of line along with Ty Gibbs in the final laps in hopes of making a run to the front, lost his momentum and fell all the way to the back of the pack. He finished a disappointing 27th, continuing a string of underwhelming performances to open up the season.

“Ride in line [and] finish where [you are],” Busch wrote on X. “TRY to race for win [and] finish last. I hate these [explicit] cars!!!”

Denny Hamlin, speaking on his “Actions Detrimental” podcast, said he agreed with Busch’s assessment of the Next Gen car when it comes to superspeedway racing.

Denny Hamlin backs Kyle Busch’s statement

“He’s so right though,” Hamlin said. “And that’s the tough part about it, is that when you look at the final restart, it looks like the last lap. The two cars that controlled the outside line and the inside line were the same cars the entire last thirty laps. Because you cannot afford to get out of line. If you get out of line, it’s over. The reason that is is because these cars have a ton of drag. That’s basically how far the car can go down the straightaway… On top of that, we’ve changed to a common engine because we want to save costs… so we now we have more horsepower than we’ve ever had on a superspeedway.

“But we’ve had to put a giant spoiler on the back of the car to slow them down. And we’ve slowed them down even more because cars have flipped over in the last few years and NASCAR wants to limit liability there, so they keep slowing the cars down more and more and more. What happens is, when you get in a line, the drag of your car reduces by a huge amount. So, the air is divided up over not one car, but ten cars in a line. But the drag is divided up between all of them. And it really varies based on how close you are to the front and back of the car in front of you and behind you. And you can keep going faster and faster the closer you get to those cars.

“The negative is when you go to pull out of line and actually pass. It is a parachute, exactly right, it’s like pulling a dragster parachute when you’re done with your run. The car stops immediately because it’s so heavy on drag.”

Busch has just one top-5 finish, and two top-10 finishes this season. It has been nothing but frustration for him and his No. 8 Richard Childress Racing team. At this point in the season last year, Busch had two wins, two top-10s, and another top-5 to his record.