The dawn of another NASCAR season embodies the first-day-of-school feel, especially for the teams. Daytona International Speedway has its enduring splendor, same as it ever was, but for the teams, it’s an expectant feeling of newness – from the new-look personnel alignments to fresh paint-scheme designs that fit like a new pair of sneakers.
Two of the sport’s three automakers have added to the new-day originality upon this week’s Daytona arrival, with Ford and Toyota unveiling restyled bodies for their Cup Series racers this year. The new Ford Mustang Dark Horse and the 2025 Toyota Camry XSE will mount fresh challenges to the reign of the venerable Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, which carries over into this season as the current benchmark and winner of the last three Cup Series manufacturers’ championships.
The competition among car makes should stay a prime focus in the ramp-up to Monday’s season-opening Daytona 500 (4 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Each manufacturer was represented by two teams in testing last December at Phoenix Raceway, but the majority of the Ford and Toyota organizations will experience their first taste of speedway-style racing conditions with the new bodies in Thursday night’s Bluegreen Vacations Duel qualifying races (7 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
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Cup Series haulers are scheduled to enter the Daytona garage later Tuesday, with equipment and cars unloading for yet another Speedweek at the 2.5-mile track. How those cars unload in a figurative, performance-based sense is another top question that hangs over the 2024 season.
All the wind-tunnel testing and aerodynamic computer modeling leading up to this week’s festivities should help to inform what that answer might be, especially within the tight confines of the NASCAR Rule Book and the Next Gen car platform.
“Yes, we all look at what each of us are doing,” said David Wilson, Toyota Racing Development (TRD) USA president, noting that the wind-tunnel process has been marked by transparency and equal time among all three manufacturers. “We pay more attention to where we stack up when it comes to that aero box that we have to finish in, in order to get our body submitted. I know on paper, (Ford’s) car looked good in the wind tunnel, so did ours. You know, Chevrolet was the dominant manufacturer by far last season, and I think they’re the bogey ultimately for both of us to chase as we look at 2024.”
Looking at the automaker pursuit in reverse order of last year’s manufacturers’ standings, Ford wound up third in the point total but was first to debut their 2024 model. The Mustang Dark Horse bowed in the days leading up to last year’s season finale at Phoenix Raceway, where Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney finished off his strong playoff run with the second consecutive Cup Series title for a Ford driver.
“I mean, we feel like we’re better and obviously winning two championships is great, and if we didn’t have a target on our back last year, we certainly have one on our back this year,” said Richard Johns, NASCAR Performance Leader for Ford Performance Motorsports. “So we knew that we had to go into this year and be better. The best way that we could be better is coming with a new car and coming with new ideas to try and be better across the board and improve speedways, improve intermediates, improve short tracks and give our teams more ability to make their cars better on a given weekend. We didn’t know that we were going to wind up there, and certainly through the summer months, it didn’t look like we were going to wind up there, but we found performance at the right time and our teams peaked at the right time, and now we just hope that we can do it again.”
Ford teams were able to steady their path after a rocky start to 2023, marked by just one win in the first 13 races. The upswing of RFK Racing just before the playoffs, combined with Blaney’s closing kick and a Front Row Motorsports bright spot with Michael McDowell’s dominant Indy win helped feed some of this season’s optimism.
“We worked as hard as we could on ’23 cars to try and find that performance, and because the box is so small and the tune-ability on the cars are so small, we were able to take a lot of those learnings and roll it right into our (2024) submission,” Johns said. “But we knew where we needed to go, based on our performance at the race track and the simulation and everything. We knew what we needed to do to a new car to get to a higher level of performance, and we just rolled all that stuff forward.”
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Johns pointed out the styling cues and character lines of the second edition of the Next Gen Mustang during a tour of the Ford Performance Technical Center last month, and the sharp, aggressive contours of the front fenders stood out. Blaney and RFK’s Chris Buescher gave the Mustang Dark Horse its on-track christening during testing on Phoenix’s 1-mile layout, but the reigning Cup champ said more experience on different track types will tell the whole tale.
“The mindset when you have a new body and stuff like that right, you don’t want to trade off anything, right? You’re just trying to get everything better,” Blaney said during the Busch Light Clash weekend in Los Angeles. “And it was no secret the old Mustang was super-good on the speedways, and I hope we haven’t lost anything on that side of it. At least what you’re working toward, it doesn’t show we’ve lost anything, but we’ve just gained on the mile-and-a-half side. Downforce numbers seem to be better. So I hope we just elevated everything, but we’ll find out next week. I could only tell so much in Phoenix. I think it’s gonna be bigger when we get to mile-and-a-half’s and stuff like that.”
For Toyota, the Camry – the only model the automaker has raced since its Cup Series debut in 2007 – gets a face-lift with its XSE Next Gen racer. The road-going version that gives the NASCAR stocker its new look is scheduled to hit showrooms as a 2025 model this spring.
Denny Hamlin’s victory in the Clash exhibition on the Los Angeles Coliseum’s tiny quarter-mile oval has given Toyota, last year’s manufacturers’ points runner-up, an unofficial 1-0 record to start the season. But it’s the bigger tracks with a heightened aero emphasis where Camry drivers hope that the new sculpted bumpers and quarter panels can make a difference; Toyota has been shut out the last two seasons on superspeedway-style tracks (Atlanta, Daytona, Talladega), a 12-race drought.
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“I expect the shape of the bumper, front and back, should be much better for us,” said Tyler Reddick, entering his second season with 23XI Racing’s Toyota operation. “You know, the thing that bit me in the (Daytona) 500 last year is just getting pushed in the corner, and the shape of last year’s bumper was not great for drafting. The shape of it really lifts the back of the car up when you do get pushed, and just that little tap I got from (Kevin) Harvick was enough to spin us around. So hopefully, the work that everyone did there, on the part of Toyota and TRD, helps that.
“We haven’t drafted the car yet, so I guess we’ll know when we get down there. But between Daytona and Atlanta to start the year, we’re gonna get a good grasp on where we’re at, and then have some time to work on it and make it better for later in the year as well.”
No major changes are planned in 2024 for the Chevrolet Camaro ZL1, which returns as the circuit’s standard-bearer after winning half of the 36 points-paying Cup Series events last year and sealing the manufacturers’ title with two races to go. Five organizations won races for Chevrolet last year, led by Hendrick Motorsports’ 10 victories.
One school of thought intimates that the fresh car bodies could give Ford and Toyota an aero edge at certain tracks if the data-fueled optimism translates to results. The other prevailing wisdom is that Chevrolet teams would continue to power forward, building on their inventory of performance notes and success while their rivals try to gain a handle on their new cars.
Dr. Eric Warren — Executive Director of Global Motorsports Competition for General Motors – said that the tight, competitive balance of working within the NASCAR Rule Book’s constraints should regulate the impact of either of those scenarios, as all three manufacturers strive to push the edges of the Next Gen platform’s aero limits.
“It’s so close. I mean really, honestly, they’re on top of each other,” Warren told NASCAR.com. “So we kind of know what the performance of those cars are, and so it’s not as much of an unknown as before. I would say when the aero balance maybe is a little bit different or if it moves, say, forward a little bit, that’s where understanding your car and the notebook comes in, because you have a lot more comfort in it. And you see that every year when we’ve come out with new cars, it takes a while to really get your hand on them, because there’s a lot of things that are unknown, that the wind tunnel doesn’t show or CFD [computational fluid dynamics] doesn’t show when you get around other cars, they behave a little different. So there’s a little bit of that, but the cars are all pretty close. And so I think it’s not going to be as big a difference as everyone thinks.”
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While the NASCAR-ready Chevrolet’s body isn’t changing, speculation remains about what’s next. General Motors ended production of the Camaro last month, and the 2024 model year will be its last – for now, at least. Chevy has raced the Camaro ZL1 each year since the model’s Cup Series debut in 2018, freshening the body for the transition from the sixth-generation stock car to the Next Gen platform ahead of the 2022 season.
Chevrolet is allowed to compete with the Camaro into 2025 and beyond if the company wishes, as NASCAR eligibility rules state that the car needs only to be in production at time it is designed. Where the manufacturer goes next in stock-car racing is still up for conjecture, but Warren offered that the Camaro nameplate – most recently revived in 2010 for showrooms – has life left in GM’s plans.
“I think, as we go forward, our official thing we say is that the Camaro’s story has not ended,” Warren says. “It’s come in and out in the past, and the auto industry and the models, it’s very dynamic and there’s a lot of things going on in it, and we have a lot of great products coming out in the future. So, you know, we’ve done a lot of research, and our goal really is to connect to Chevrolet fans. I think the Camaro has been a great platform for us, but really our connection and performance on the race track is really to connect to those Chevrolet and then across all of our GM products, use the platform to create those customers who end up buying our cars — all of our cars.”