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Chase Elliott Responds To Justin Marks As Gripes About Next Gen Cars Continue To Pile Up
Chase Elliott made it clear he doesn't believe NASCAR should be moving backward in its car design.
The debate over NASCAR’s Next Gen cars continues, this time with current Cup Series contender Chase Elliott and Trackhouse Racing co-owner Justin Marks trading words about it on Twitter.
Marks has been an outspoken advocate for the decision to switch all drivers in the 2022 Cup Series to the new Next Gen cars. However, that opinion has become more and more controversial as the season's progressed, with and drivers like Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick and Daniel Suarez openly criticizing the cars’ performance on the track.
Following last weekend’s race at Texas Motor Speedway in which there were some more troubles for the Next Gen, Marks took to Twitter to note that he believes getting these cars to perform at the same level as the old cars will take time and be a learning process.
“This new car is the most radical change in the history of @NASCAR - perfecting its performance and safety is going to be a process,” he wrote. “We cannot assume perfection right out of the gates. This comes from an owner whose parts expense is an order of magnitude more than budgeted.”
This caught the attention of Elliott, who didn’t mince words in response to Marks.
“With the experience and knowledge gained since 1948 and the technology we have in 2022… we should never take steps backwards in any area with a new design,” he wrote.
Marks soon responded by implying that this new season and the Next Gen cars offer everyone in motorsports a chance to adapt for the future.
“I don’t necessarily disagree, I think a perfected product right out of the gates is still a bit of a tall order. I think the true test is going to be what we do now,” he responded.
Regardless of how things are going with the cars in the 2022 season. Marks previously told Forbes that the old way simply wasn’t working.
“I think the issue for so long was this got to be an engineering arms race between the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and where that and that became a matter of teams with the most capital to deploy across engineering R&D platforms were going to win the races and less and less of it was in the driver's control,” he said earlier this year. “The teams with more financial resources were bringing superior pieces of equipment to the racetrack. So, I ... personally was never going to enter the sport at that time. I didn’t want to wait 10 years to finally be in a position to compete.”
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