Nascar Teams Learning To Adapt To Next Gen Supply Chain Issues

While the world continues its slow recovery from a global pandemic many industries are still suffering from supply chain issues ranging from raw materials to computer chips. Those issues seemed to affect the sport of NASCAR prior to the season, and according to some in the industry may still be a problem.

In addition to the normal pre-season hype before the 2022 NASCAR season there was anxiety beyond the normal pre-season jitters among teams. After a year’s delay, the new Next Gen car was going to make its debut in February and there concerns that teams wouldn’t have enough cars to compete in the first few races, much less the entire season due to supply chain issues.

The new car not only has significant mechanical changes but features many common elements such as body panels and suspension parts that come from single manufacturers, a move designed to bring more parity to the sport.

But by the middle January there were reports that some teams only had two or three of the five race ready cars needed by the time the season opening Daytona 500 took the green flag. There was talk that drivers would need to be careful with the new cars raced at the Clash, a non-points exhibition race at the L.A. Coliseum two weeks before Daytona since those cars might be needed for Daytona.

Then at Speedweeks, the traditional week leading up to the Daytona 500, NASCAR and the speedway announced that the winning car would not be kept and displayed at the track’s museum for a year as had been tradition since 1997 due to concerns around the inventory of new cars for the teams. Instead, a show car would be wrapped to match the winning car and displayed.

A few weeks after the race however, and despite at first saying they would need to keep the car, winner Austin Cindric and team owner Roger Penske wheeled the winning car into its display.

At the time Penske acknowledged supply chain issues forced the team to hold onto the car, but said that “NASCAR sat down with us, we worked out the details for our inventory going forward, and we’re here.”

There seemed to be no talk of supply chain issues through the next five races of the season and the Next Gen car seemed to preform flawlessly on track.

Then prior to the race at Richmond at the start of April, Denny Hamlin, driver for Joe Gibbs Racing, as well as co-owner of 23XI Racing seemed to hint that perhaps supply chain issues were still plaguing teams. According to Hamlin, employees were being forced to put in long hours trying to keep up with getting cars ready to race.

“I’m not sure what we can do about it,” he said. “We have to work extreme hours. We have to wait on parts, like my crew chief told me on the plane this morning – don’t tear the splitter up. We have legitimate concerns that we won’t have a splitter for Martinsville.

“Just be gentle, but how do you do that and race too? The short supply is causing extended hours and eventually people – I think I saw some stuff on Twitter yesterday – teams are losing a lot of people just because of workload and eventually it becomes a problem. You can’t afford to just pay them more – we’re trying to do everything we can to tread water right now. It’s just a tough position that we are in.

“The supply chain is just not coming through to us as good as it needs to, but we’ve designated one supplier to do all the work and when that one supplier doesn’t get the stuff we need, we are stuck because we told everyone else to pound sand. It’s just a tough spot to be in right now and the teams don’t know what else to do. It’s tough to retain your workforce right now and all of the teams are losing people.”

A few weeks prior to Hamlin’s comments, Brad Keselowski, a new team co-owner, ran afoul of NASCAR when his No. 6 Ford failed an inspection after being taken back to NASCAR’s R&D Center in Concord North Carolina after the race at Atlanta. The team was docked 100 driver points and 100 owner points and crew chief Matt McCall was fined $100,000 and suspended from the next four NASCAR Cup Series points races.

In addition, if the No. 6 team of Brad Keselowski qualify for the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, it will be penalized with the loss of 10 NASCAR Playoff points.

The penalty came under Sections 14.1 and 14.5 in the NASCAR Rule Book, both of which pertain to the modification of a single source supplied part.

However, what part NASCAR was referring to was a mystery. In years past, many times the sanctioning body or the team, would let the everyone in the garage know what the part, and the infraction was. Yet, after Atlanta there was silence from everyone involved.

At Martinsville Speedway, however, Keselowski finally revealed what the “single sourced” part was, and what had gone wrong.

“We had repaired a tail panel and it had a key feature that NASCAR deemed was not repaired adequately enough,” Keselowski said. “We didn’t want to run the tail panel. We didn’t have any new tail panels to put on the car. We had a tail panel with three races on it and we did some repairs to it.”

His comments came a few days after the team’s appeal of the penalties was denied by an appeals panel.

“Our intent to appeal the penalty was to show everybody that we didn’t want to run that tail panel,” Keselowski said. “If we had a new one, we would have ran it to begin with, so it’s a difficult position. Ultimately, it’s NASCAR’s position that the parts and pieces have to be right.”

And he seemed to put some blame on supply chain issues.

“I think we made our repairs in good faith, but probably didn’t do a great job,” he said. “Did I think there was a competitive advantage? Probably not, but we put NASCAR in a tough position of having to make a judgment call and that’s not fair to them, so it’s one of those situations where I don’t think anybody is really wrong and nobody is really right and it’s probably one of those situations that if we could repeat, we would have begged, borrowed and stole a new tail and put it on the car, but that’s not the world we were living in.”

As for the supply chain issues putting teams in a tough position.

“That’s probably a better question for the operations and manufacturing guys,” he said. “I know it’s getting better than it was two or three months ago, but as to whether it’s perfect or not that’s probably not a good spot for me to answer.”

One of those operations guys is Brian Murphy associate shop foreman at Stewart-Haas Racing, a team which fields four Next Gen cars in the Cup series. On the podcast Door, Bumper, Clear, Murphy said it was tough as the season started, but that teams are adapting.

“Honestly, I think we’ve reached the bottom,” he said. “I think from here on out things are just going to get better, we’re getting more parts, we have more cars and we’ve gotten used to dealing with these parts shortages. At first it was very uncomfortable for us because we’ve always had an unlimited supply of parts and pieces and hours and really nothing to hold us back.

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“Now we kind of go back to our short track roots. Cars don’t get power washed every week; we kind of hand wipe them off and you start flipping them around really quickly; parts are instantly coming off cars to be put on cars for next week. So, we’ve gotten a lot more efficient at that. It’s part of this Next Gen process, this is what NASCAR wants, this is what we need; we need to be more efficient; we need to be more stable with what we’re doing and that’s what’s happening.”

Those “short track roots” include long hours for those who work behind the scenes in the shops getting cars ready to race. That’s something that has always been part of the NASCAR life. Beyond that teams seem to be doing what they’ve always done, adapting to the situation they’ve been put in.

While there was some trepidation before the season started concerning the supply chain issues, the more the season goes on, the better teams seem to be adapting, and the smoother that supply chain becomes. For those teams that don’t adapt, they will have to answer to sponsors, and their fans as their cars fall further down the running order each week.

As the old saying goes, the teams can either lead, follow, or get out of the way.