The Brickyard 400 came back to the Indianapolis oval carrying a decade of goodwill. It left with the NASCAR Cup Series arguing about its own race car.
Corey Heim won on Sunday, 26 July, and the finish itself was genuine - a daring outside pass on team co-owner Denny Hamlin on the final restart with 35 laps to go, then a 0.287-second hold-off of Christopher Bell. Almost everything before it was a queue. Passing outside of pit cycles and restarts barely happened, and the drivers said so bluntly afterwards.
Joey Logano, who finished third, was asked by The Athletic's Jeff Gluck what it would take to see a green-flag pass for the lead at Indianapolis in the Next Gen car.
"Probably an Xfinity car," Logano answered. "This things ... we can't do it. We can't get close enough to make a move. You get stuck. Multiple groove track is necessary. This one doesn't have that."
Logano was careful to separate the racing from the venue. "It's forever going to be a Crown Jewel in my mind. It's forever a special race, and something you always want to say you have a shot at winning."
"I think we need to slow down. We were so fast in the corner," Hocevar said. "I mean, I felt like there were times where I'd get a really big run on somebody, and just the straightaway is not long enough to trump pushing them out, or the lack of air I have."
Hocevar's own numbers made the point. "I just think it's the second I got clean air, I went a second faster. I got by [Tyler] Reddick and was instantly a second faster, but I wasn't really fast at the end of the race."
Even the winner described the day as survival rather than racing. "I was hanging on for dear life once the shade went down and the pace picked up," Heim said. "My car got really loose and I never really got a lot of clean air throughout the day, so that was the hardest I've ever fought in my life to make sure I focused on the exits and get through dirty air."
Hamlin, who sits on NASCAR's competition committee and whose winless streak at Indianapolis reached 18 races, has since put a specific technical fix on the table. Speaking on his Actions Detrimental podcast on Monday, he argued the problem is where the car generates its downforce.
"I would love to work with the competition committee on coming up with a fix, you know, or something that moves the needle for the Next Gen car at Indy," Hamlin said. "I am an absolute firm believer, and Joe Gibbs Racing would hate me right now because we're so dialed with the way things are, but we got to get the back of the cars up. We got to get the front of the cars down."
He was more explicit about the mechanism. "That is the way to fix the racing at Indy. You have to make it to where the air the downforce is coming from the overbody, not the underbody. That is the way."
Not everyone thinks the car is the fixable part. Writing for Frontstretch, Nick Tylwalk argued the flat Indianapolis oval and the current Cup car simply do not mix, and that there may be no obvious remedy at all - noting the 2026 race sat at 22.7 per cent in Gluck's long-running "Was It a Good Race?" poll, which would place it inside the ten worst-rated races in a decade of that survey. His conclusion cut against the groundswell that brought the oval race back in the first place: almost anything, including a return to the infield road course, would be preferable.
The Cup Series now gets its first break in 16 weeks before Iowa on 9 August, which gives the competition committee an off-week to think about it.
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*Originally published on [Motorsports Global](https://motorsports.global/article/drivers-turn-on-the-next-gen-car-after-brickyard-400-slog). Visit for full coverage.*