Gen 7 car has turned the tables at Martinsville Speedway
03/27/2025 02:45 PM
For the first time in the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series regular season, drivers in the top division will compete on a bona fide short track when the series visits Martinsville Speedway for Sunday‘s Cook Out 400 (3 p.m. ET on FS1, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
With a few exceptions, Martinsville traditionally has been a feast-or-famine track. Alex Bowman, who won the fall race in 2021, has no other top-five finishes in 17 starts at the 0.526-mile paper-clip-shaped venue.
Similarly, Christopher Bell, who secured a Championship 4 berth with a Martinsville victory in 2022, hasn‘t scored another top five at the track in his nine starts there.
Of course, there are exceptions. In his last five races at the track in southern Virginia, Kyle Larson, the driver of the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, has posted an average finish of 2.8, and he comes to Martinsville fresh from his first victory of the season last Sunday at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
"When I started at Hendrick Motorsports, the car was probably a little bit better than I was at Martinsville," Larson said. "But we‘ve gotten better as a whole, and I think it‘s one of our best tracks now.
"We got a win there in 2023 and had solid runs and finishes there last year, so we‘re looking forward to this weekend."
The introduction of the Next Gen car into NASCAR‘s top series in 2022 has proven to be a real line of demarcation. In the Gen 6 era, drivers such as Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano, Brad Keselowski and Martin Truex Jr. took center stage at Martinsville.
In the Gen 7 era, those four competitors are winless at the paper clip, and Hendrick drivers have moved to the forefront. Defending race winner William Byron led a 1-2-3 Hendrick finish in last year‘s spring race, marking the first time a single organization has swept the podium positions at Martinsville.
The victory was Byron‘s second at the track since 2021, with Larson accounting for another Hendrick win in the spring Race of 2023. Byron, however, approaches the Cook Out 400 with some degree of trepidation.
Yes, he has won two of the last three spring races, but the No. 24 team has struggled at Martinsville in the fall, barely making the Championship 4 with finishes of 16th and sixth in 2023 and 2024.
"I‘m confident but also not extremely confident," Byron said. "We‘ve had some good runs, and we‘ve also had some just OK runs. We have some work to do from Bowman Gray (at the Clash in February) on our short-track package, but I think we‘ll still be in a good place.
"It‘s really about having a good long-run car, and that‘s what we will really focus on."
Ryan Blaney has won the fall Playoff race for the past two seasons—with his 2023 win leading to a series championship—and Bell has the other triumph in the past six Gen 7 races.
Hamlin leads all full-time active drivers with five Martinsville victories, and it‘s not as if the driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota hasn‘t been in the mix in the Next Gen era. He simply hasn‘t been in Victory Lane.
In four of the last five Martinsville races, Hamlin has finished in the top-five. He also leads active drivers in career top fives (20), top 10s (26) and laps led at the track (2,448).
Another radical change in the Next Gen era is the apparent diminishing importance of starting position at Martinsville. The last five winners have come from starting spots outside the top 10. In the previous 14 races, only twice did the eventual winner start from a grid position worse than 10th.
— NASCAR News Wire —
