NASCAR superspeedway racing isn't good any way you slice it

Joey Logano summed up the current state of NASCAR superspeedway racing well after crashing out of Sunday's Jack Link's 500 at Talladega. 

"What do you want? Save fuel or crash," Logano said on the Fox telecast. "Pick one. It's what it feels like right now. It's frustrating. You got round bumpers on these things, the cars are unstable. Once everyone starts pushing and racing aggressive, [crashes] are going to happen. Until we fix that stuff, we're going to continue seeing it, unfortunately."

Despite NASCAR's best efforts to improve the racing by changing stage lengths to try to cut down on fuel mileage racing, Stage 1 was unsurprisingly defined by half-throttle racing with little action. Strategy did mix things up a little bit, as did a rash of pit road penalties, but the first 98 laps of Sunday's race were largely uneventful. 

Once business picked up early in Stage 2, a massive, 26-car wreck occurred on Lap 115 after a bad push from Ross Chastain to the back bumper of Bubba Wallace sent the latter around in front of the pack. 

It's the kind of unavoidable "Big One" drivers and fans are accustomed to seeing at Talladega, but it was made more frustrating by the fact that it happened as soon as the field actually put the pedal down for the first time all afternoon. 

Time for NASCAR to fix superspeedway racing

The race's final stage was more exciting, as all dashes to the finish at Talladega are, but it was exactly the same as most Talladega races have been since the advent of the Next-Gen car in 2022: double-wide, gridlocked racing that is all but guaranteed to be a drag race between the leader of each lane on the final lap. 

Carson Hocevar ended up besting Chris Buescher to win Sunday's race and, to his credit, gave fans something to remember with a prolonged celebration that saw him drive his car while hanging out of the driver's side window. 

It's unfortunate that an iconic moment such as Hocevar's first win came in a race that was largely bland, aside from the Lap 115 'Big One' that showed the other side of the proverbial coin regarding superspeedway racing.

It's not as if there's a magical fix coming anytime soon. NASCAR's Next-Gen car doesn't race well at superspeedways due to its high levels of drag, which make it difficult for drivers to pull out of line and mount a charge, even with cars behind them. 

That gives way to drivers saving fuel under green in an effort to gain track position on pit road. And when they do decide to put the loud pedal down, they become gridlocked just as they were on Sunday, racing two-by-two to the checkered flag in a race that will almost inevitably end with a crash at the checkered. 

Superspeedway racing in NASCAR is inherently broken at the moment, and for a style of racing so important to the image and culture of NASCAR, that's not okay.