CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - The only certainty at the unveiling of NASCAR's new car was the Gen-6 was aesthetically pleasing.
The new design looked more like a stock car and returned brand recognition to the manufacturers. Adding driver names to the windshield was a late addition, but a sporty touch.
But if the Gen-6 wasn't racy, NASCAR's exhaustive yearlong effort would amount to nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.
Turns out all that hand-wringing was unnecessary.
Through nine races, the on-track action with the Gen-6 is much improved from a year ago, when fans were screaming about how boring NASCAR had become. The races haven't been perfect, but there's been no shortage of story lines and few runaway wins.
"I'm telling you, whoever designed this new car, we should kiss "em every weekend. It's creating drama," Clint Bowyer said after Saturday night's race at Richmond. "We haven't seen racing like this in years, since I first started in this sport (in 2004). When you can leave a race track and there's people in tears because they won, and in tears because they got crashed, that's what brings us to the race track, that kind of racing and determination and passion."
The idea behind the Gen-6 was to improve the racing on intermediate tracks, where it was unwatchable at times last year.
NASCAR suffered through a brutal stretch last spring of painfully long green-flag runs with very little side-by-side racing. There were few cautions beyond occasional yellow flags for debris, and a four-race stretch without a multicar accident.
The problems were never more glaring than Memorial Day weekend, when just hours after one of the most exciting Indianapolis 500's in history, NASCAR staged a nearly four-hour snoozefest at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Only nine cars were on the lead lap of the Coca-Cola 600 when Kasey Kahne beat Denny Hamlin to the finish line by a whopping 4.295 seconds.
The racing hasn't been so monotonous this year and the statistics back it up after nine races:
• There have been 1,203 more green flag passes throughout the field.
• The average margin of victory is .634 seconds, compared to 1.759 seconds last year.
• There are 49.9 percent of the cars finishing on the lead lap this year, up from 38.2 last year.
• The percentage of cars running at the finish of the race is up 3 percent to 83.2.
And, as Bowyer said, the drama has increased immensely.
Former teammates Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano crossed paths in the closing laps of the season-opening Daytona 500, and the feud culminated with their white-knuckled, door-to-door race to the finish in California last month. Each driver was so bent on not losing to the other, they ended up wrecking moments after Kyle Busch slid past them for the victory.
The accident sent Hamlin to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with a compression fracture in a vertebra that has sidelined him the last four races. Injury aside, that's the racing NASCAR chairman Brian France had in mind when he demanded his senior management design a car that could improve the product.
"I have said repeatedly, every minute, that contact, especially late in the race when you are going for a win, that's not only going to happen - that's expected," France said last month. "Both of them did exactly what I think you would do when you really, really want to win. Getting some contact, trying to race extra hard to win the race, that's what we're about."
It was on display again Saturday night at Richmond when a late caution sent the race into overtime for a two-lap sprint to the finish. Kevin Harvick rocketed from seventh to first, while Tony Stewart was knocked out of the groove by a hard-charging Kurt Busch, who called the final two laps "a free-for-all."
Stewart restarted fifth, was bumped out of the way by Busch, and wound up 18th and angry.
"He just rammed right into us there at the end," Stewart said through a team spokesman.