NASCAR '24 burning questions: Can Ford be better? What about Stewart-Haas?
NASCAR starts its 76th season with the Daytona 500 on Feb. 18. And as we begin, there are a number of major questions hanging over the sport.
Is Stewart-Haas Racing finished as an elite NASCAR team?
Can Chase Elliott, who missed the playoffs for the first time in his career in 2023, get back in 2024?
Will Ford be better this year? Yes, Ryan Blaney won the '23 championship, but Chevy and Toyota dominated during the regular season.
And what about Legacy Motor Club? Is it finally ready to compete? The original team was one of NASCAR's most storied organizations and different owners have tried to revive it under different names, but none have succeeded.
Despite the title in '23, Ford raced poorly
Looking at Ford's situation, Blaney's title was a case of a driver getting hot at the right time and not indicative of how poorly Ford performed in 2023.
The Ledger's competition index measures performance based on top five finishes and laps led under green on all tracks except superspeedways, superspeedways being atypical of the other tracks. In the final five races, the top drivers were Blaney (Team Penske), 150 points; Kyle Larson (Hendrick Motorsports), 120; Christopher Bell (Joe Gibbs Racing), 104; Ross Chastain (Trackhouse Racing), 84; and William Byron (Hendrick Motorsports), 58. But that doesn't tell you much.
Despite winning the championship, Ford struggled on the intermediate tracks, all basically a mile and a half long and the bread-and-butter of NASCAR competition. Chevy's Hendrick Motorsports scored 820 points on intermediate tracks and Joe Gibbs Racing, Toyota's top team, had 676. Team Penske, Ford's top entry and the team Blaney drives for, had only 187 and Stewart-Haas added just 74.
It wasn't supposed to be that way. NASCAR's "next gen" car, introduced in 2022, was supposed to make all three manufacturers equal. But in 2023, Chevy appeared to have a more aerodynamic nose than Ford and while it works in combination with the chassis and the engine, the nose determines how air flows over, under and around the car. The smoother the air flow, the more downforce it has.
The more downforce, the faster the car goes into, through and out of the corner, allowing it to achieve maximum speed down the straights. If a car loses downforce in the turns, it will either get loose, with the rear sliding up the track, or tight, with the front wanting to head into the wall, scrubbing off speed.
NASCAR let Ford reshape its nose for 2024, and the changes should give the Fords a more aerodynamic profile and increase downforce. But since there is no testing before the Daytona 500, there are a lot of unknowns going in.
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And because the Daytona 500 is a superspeedway race, where the cars run nose to tail in a pack, there is little correlation between that race and how a car will perform by itself or around other cars on other tracks. For example, last year Ford finished first or second in five of the six superspeedway races but still had problems on intermediate ovals.
Stewart-Haas in need of a new way
Then there's Stewart-Haas. Once one of NASCAR's top four teams (along with Penske, Hendrick and Gibbs), Stewart-Haas is simply not competitive anymore. And the retirement of Kevin Harvick, Stewart-Haas' best driver, and the departure of Aric Almirola might make things worse. Replacing Harvick and Almirola are Josh Berry and Noah Gregson. Both have limited Cup experience and have never won a Cup race. Neither has Ryan Preece, the third driver. Only Chase Briscoe, with a win at Phoenix, has been to victory lane.
Tony Stewart insists this team can compete and nothing motivates him more than somebody telling him he can't do something. But he seems to have circled the wagons at Stewart-Haas, and this team needs to do something different, needs to look at things a different way, because what it's doing clearly isn't working.
As for Elliott, he was plagued by injuries from a snowboarding accident and a shoulder problem in 2023. Despite missing seven races, or almost 20% of the season, he still scored 193 points, 12th on the competition index, and had 100 on the intermediate tracks, 11th best. Additionally, he is one of NASCAR's top road racers and with Hendrick behind him, should be fine in 2024.
Can the two-car Legacy Motor Club compete?
Then there's Legacy Motor Club. This is the old Petty Enterprises, which collapsed with the on-track death of Adam Petty, Richard Petty's grandson, in 2000.
Petty, whose family has been in NASCAR since its start, is pretty much out of the picture now. Jimmie Johnson, who won seven Cup championships for Hendrick Motorsports, is involved in ownership and the new face of the team.
For 2024, Legacy has hooked up with Toyota, which has promised the same kind of support it gives Joe Gibbs Racing. That means Legacy will have everything it needs to run up front. John Hunter Nemechek, son of Lakeland native and former driver Joe Nemechek, and Erik Jones will be in the Legacy cars.
One of the oddities of the 2023 season was that, discounting Legacy, NASCAR's four best two-car teams all had one dominant driver. At Trackhouse, Chastain had 385 points, Daniel Suarez 57. At Richard Childress Racing, Kyle Busch had 313, Austin Dillon four. At Roush-Fenway-Keselowski, Chris Buescher had 265, Brad Keselowski 101. And at 23XI, Michael Jordan's team, Tyler Reddick had 338, Bubba Wallace 134. Whether that trend will continue remains to be seen.
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Hendrick and Gibbs domination: Expect more
In 2023, the five most competitive drivers were Larson (Hendrick Motorsports), 643 points; Byron (Hendrick Motorsports), 599; Denny Hamlin (Joe Gibbs Racing), 573; Martin Truex (Joe Gibbs Racing) 562 and Chastain (Trackhouse Racing), 385.
While some things will likely change this year, the dominance of Hendrick and Gibbs in the Cup series will almost certainly continue. Gibbs has had at least one car in the last round of the playoffs for five straight years and won one championship. Hendrick has placed at least one entry in the final round for the past four years and has two championships.
While reaching the finals of the playoffs and winning championships is not an absolute measure of a team's strength, it does give some indication of it.
Going into 2024, Larson appears best positioned to win the championship. He finished second to Blaney in 2023 and ran very well on the intermediate tracks, scoring 360 points. Hamlin had 326. On the short tracks, which are also critical in NASCAR, Larson had 263 points and Hamlin 194.
Larson's main competition will likely come from Hamlin, who has done everything but win a championship. The joker in the deck is superspeedway racing, where anything can happen. You can be taken out of the race by "the big (multi-car) wreck," which is common to these races, or be in the wrong line of cars on the last lap and end up with a bad finish. And there are two superspeedways in the playoffs: Atlanta and Talladega.
Still, while Blaney won last year and Ford should be more competitive in 2024, look for Hamlin to avoid the bad luck that has plagued him in the past and knock off Larson to win his first title.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: NASCAR burning questions: Can Ford be better? What about Stewart-Haas?
