The sport has continued to grow more and more standardized over the years. In the pre-Next Gen era, Cup and its feeder divisions mixed ingenuity with hand-me-down parts. Cup teams built fleets of bespoke chassis and, after a season or two, sold them downstream to Xfinity and Trucks, helping smaller outfits stay afloat. That ecosystem, plus a patchwork of race-by-race purses, kept many mid-pack teams alive even when sponsorship ebbed. One can trace how much the economy has tightened by the exits and contractions over the last decade, from Richard Childress Racing shuttering its Truck team after 2013 to Brad Keselowski conceding his Truck outfit losing $1 million before closing in 2017, and Stewart-Haas Racing folding all NASCAR teams after 2024.

And spec racing changed the calculus. The Tr

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