Teams in the NASCAR Cup series have traditionally cycled through cars at a rapid rate, opening the door for feeder
and historic series to create groups for these formerly retired machines to run in. Car counts are booming.

When NASCAR unveiled the seventh-generation “Next Gen” Cup car in May 2021, it represented a sea change for the series and the teams that race in it. Outfitted with a new chassis and body design, a five-speed sequential gearbox, and an independent rear suspension, the latest Cup car is a significant technological step forward from its predecessors.
“Nothing on the Gen 7 car transfers over from the previous Cup cars,” noted Danny Puchala of Stock Car Surplus in Gaffney, South Carolina. “That car is a beast all unto itself. I’ve built four of them from the ground up, and there isn’t a nut or bolt that’s common between the old car and the new one.”
For teams competing in the series, the changeover effectively made their sixth-generation cars obsolete. But as we discovered, the end of a car’s Cup series career isn’t necessarily the end of its racing days. While some with significant race history have gone on to live pampered lives in collections, more and more of them are getting back on track to mix it up in wheel-to-wheel competition once again.

A Brief Window Of Cup Series Viability

While the introduction of the Next Gen Cup car ended its predecessor’s reign in the series, the replacement of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-generation chassis during their respective eras in the series was shockingly rapid relative to the turnover rates seen in other series and racing disciplines.
“With the sixth-generation car, teams would often run them for five or six races and then get rid of them,” explained Jim Barfield of Vintage Racecar Restorations, Lafayette, Georgia. “The teams are always trying to build a better mouse trap. They were constantly building new cars with the thinking that the next car would be better than the last one. With the Cup guys, money is no object. Some of these teams have hundreds of employees, and those folks need something to work on. So unless a particular car was just going out there and kicking everybody’s butt, the thought was that whatever they were going to replace it with would be faster.”
Charles Krall of the ARCA series in Temperance, Michigan, also pointed out that the specialized nature of older Cup cars meant that a particular chassis might only see a handful of races over several seasons of racing. “With the Gen 5 car, I think most teams built their cars with the expectation that they’d run it for an entire season, if not longer,” Krall said. “But this was back in the day when some Cup operations would have 15 or 16 cars for 36 races. And some of the cars were very application specific. Some teams might’ve had a car that just raced at Kansas and Chicagoland. That’s just a couple of races over the course of a season, and that may very well have been that car’s expected life cycle.”
Carlus Gann of the Historic Stock Car Racing Association (HSCRA) told us that other cars have seen much longer stints in Cup series racing. Top-tier teams would sell their cars to others in the series after moving to a newer chassis, and those teams would in turn campaign that same car for several more seasons. “That’s common for the lower teams—they’d use one car regardless of whether they were racing at a road course or a super speedway.” But as NASCAR’s rulesets have evolved over the years, that has become a less attractive proposition. “For a period of time they kept changing the rules, requiring more steel to be put into the chassis in different areas. Eventually it’s just not cost effective to do that much work to an older chassis, and teams would have new chassis built instead.”
Puchala also said that safety concerns affected chassis’ Cup series viability in other ways. “Teams have an ideal weight that they want their cars to meet. With the Gen 6 cars, we’d have a chassis, floor pan, firewall, and fuel cell area sheet metal that could weigh as little as 725 pounds. But once you start cutting them up, it becomes a problem. For example, if a team has a crash and they repair the car, the repairs can add as much as 45 pounds to the car because of the materials that were required to get everything lined up and back together properly. So for many top-tier teams, if a car has been in an incident, they are done with it.”

Not The End Of The Road

Despite relatively brief service lives in Cup racing, many older cars have gone on to find long-term homes in other series. Today, the ARCA series is one of the most popular options for those looking to get a fourth- or fifth-generation Cup car back on the track.
“Some of these series are specifically used for driver development now,” Gann said. “It gives young drivers the ability to get up to speed and climb the ladder to get to the Cup series. Today, ARCA is the first step in that process.”

Krall said that while the majority of ARCA fields are fourth-generation Cup cars, the number of fifth-generation cars is growing. He added that ARCA’s approach to rules emphasizes driver skill over lofty budgets.
“Our front-line teams have at least one engineer on staff, if not more. But they’re not going in there and redesigning the chassis to make it go fast. We run spec bodies, so teams aren’t looking for millimeters in the wind tunnel, and the LS-based 396-cubic-inch engines come sealed from Ilmor Racing. So the development focus is really on the suspension more than anything else. The idea here was for the driver to make the biggest difference.”
Puchala said that while drivers campaigning Gen 5 cars in the ARCA series are awarded a weight break to achieve parity with the Gen 4 cars in the field, other modifications that are required of the Gen 5 cars have encouraged many teams to stick with its predecessor.
“The ARCA series has a composite body that more or less mimics the Gen 6 cars,” Puchala explained. “The problem is that the body doesn’t just fit over the Car of Tomorrow [fifth-generation] chassis. What teams have found is that they had to cut off the front clip and raise it 2 inches because the cowl height and splitter height were different. Teams would typically have to go to a chassis builder to have the front clip raised and have new down bars and a new sway bar tube put on it. That’s a $7,500 to $8,500 investment to do that, and it has encouraged a lot of the teams to put more miles on the older Gen 4 chassis.”
Xfinity is another NASCAR series where older Cup cars get a new lease on life. Xfinity is considered the next rung on the ladder from ARCA toward the Cup series, allowing drivers to further develop their skill sets before making the jump to NASCAR’s premiere series.

“At one point the Xfinity series was limited to 105-inch wheelbase, but because of the surplus of Cup cars, NASCAR opened it up to allow the 110-inch wheelbase of the Cup cars,” Gann said. “The cars had to have the bodies removed and have a Five Star fiberglass body installed. It’s also a different engine package, as Xfinity still uses a carburetor rather than EFI, but the transmission and everything else is pretty much the same.”

Other Avenues

The development track offered by the ARCA and Xfinity series provides young drivers with a clear path toward their motorsports goals, but they’re not the only places where older Cup cars are seeing action. Sports car racing clubs like the SCCA allow older Cup cars to run alongside Trans Am racers in the SPO class, but it’s vintage racing organizations that have seen the biggest influx of these cars outside of NASCAR’s own series.
“The car counts at vintage stock car races are getting way bigger,” Barfield said. “On the East Coast, the numbers have tripled in the past three years at the HSCRA events. We get a lot of folks coming to stock cars for safety. There is no safer race car than a stock car. Cost is also part of it. A ready-to-go, well-prepared stock car will cost you about a hundred grand. That’s not cheap, but you could easily spend $250,000 on a production-based Porsche. This is a lot of car for the money.”
HSCRA has also been running races alongside several NASCAR series events, and the reaction from fans has been overwhelmingly positive. “The growth of our series eventually caught NASCAR’s attention, so in 2023 they asked our Historic Stock Car group to participate in part of the NASCAR weekend at Watkins Glen,” said HSCRA’s Chris Evans. “The fans really loved it, so NASCAR asked us to participate at two events for the 2024 season, and we’re in discussions about bumping it up to four events for 2025.”

While HSCRA’s ruleset requires modern safety equipment, the cars are otherwise built with period correctness in mind rather than outright pace, and organizers will allow racers to build clones of original cars that can’t be found in the wild.
“The goal is to get the cars to represent those timeframes as closely as possible,” said Gann. “And while it’s not a contact sport, we race hard, and we race fast. So while we do our best to keep them mechanically in-period, we have to update them to current safety standards. You don’t want to be running the safety equipment they had in the 1980s—you want a full containment seat with a HANS device. It might upset some people to see an older car with a containment seat in it, but we want these cars to be as close to modern safety standards as possible.”
Barfield said that HSCRA encourages racers to otherwise set their cars up to be as in-period as is feasible. “We do kind of police ourselves, and we have an experimental class that racers can end up in if we see that things are getting out of hand. If your car had a C3 Ford motor in it originally, that’s what your car has to have in it. You can’t go and put an RF9 in a 2000 Taurus and expect to race with the main group. That’s not what it had back in the day.”
Puchala cited Sportscar Vintage Racing Association (SVRA) and Historic Sportscar Racing (HSR) as other organizations that have provided classes for older Cup cars to run in as well, though he said that these races tend to take on a different vibe than ARCA and Xfinity events.
“There’s a bit of a parity issue at some of these SCCA and SVRA races, but it’s because of different levels of experience,” he said. “I’ve sold cars to doctors and lawyers, racers who have great income streams, but they’re buying more car than they’re ready for. They want some like a Hendrick Performance Track Attack car—a 900-hp stock car. And they may have never driven a Mazda Miata on a race track before.”
Organizations like the Grand National Super Series land somewhere in the middle, he said. “This series was started by Bob Schacht, who is a former ARCA driver. They race Gen 4 and older cars, and they have a whole balance-of-performance system based on the power plant that you have in the car. You can run everything from a dry-sump small block Chevy to a Toyota Phase 11 or a Dodge R5, and they’ve got weight breaks to keep things competitive regardless of budget.”
Looking at ARCA’s long-term prospects, Krall said that he expects to stay on the established course for the foreseeable future. That means the series won’t be making the jump to the current seventh-generation Cup car anytime soon.
“I think there are enough of those older Gen 4 and Gen 5 cars out there to handle the demand, and they’re still building Gen 5-style cars for Xfinity series use. We’ll stick with this platform for as long as we possibly can.”

SOURCES

ARCA
arcaracing.com
Historic Stock Car
Racing Association
hscra.net
Vintage Racecar Restorations
vintageracecarrestorations.com
Stock Car Surplus
facebook.com/stockcarsurplus/