NASCAR will increase horsepower for Cup teams at select tracks next season, NASCAR President Steve O’Donnell stated Wednesday on the “Dale Jr. Download” podcast.
Teams will have their horsepower increase from 670 to 750 at ovals measuring less than 1.5 miles and all road courses.
“If you went beyond 750, we looked at almost $40-$50 million costs to the industry,” O’Donnell said on the podcast. “If you look at our job, it is, ‘Yeah, you want to make a call right away, but you’ve got to think about the out years.’ So, we’re looking at Dodge coming into the sport. We’re looking at other (manufacturers) coming into the sport and then our current partners.
“Those guys like the engine today, don’t want to make a change unless we’re going to stick with it. So we looked at this and said, ‘All right, we can go to 750, you guys all good? Toyota, Chevrolet, Ford? Yeah, we’re good with that, but we potentially want to go to a new engine architecture.’ That’s a three-year runway. … We didn’t want to say, ‘All right, it’s 1,000 (horsepower) now and just kidding three years from now we’re changing again.’ That’s hundreds of millions of dollars to the industry.”
O’Donnell said that there will be a test in early December at North Wilkesboro with the extra horsepower.
The tracks with the additional horsepower in 2026 will be:
Bowman Gray Stadium
Circuit of the Americas
Phoenix Raceway
Darlington Raceway
Martinsville Speedway
Bristol Motor Speedway
Watkins Glen International
Dover Motor Speedway
Nashville Superspeedway
San Diego Street Course
Sonoma Raceway
North Wilkesboro Speedway
Iowa Speedway
Richmond Raceway
New Hampshire Motor Speedway
World Wide Technology Raceway
Charlotte Motor Speedway Road Course
Those tracks will represent 21 of the 38 total races (36 points races and two exhibition races) next year.
“Like any other change that we are considering to the cars, we listen to the fans a lot,” said John Probst, NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer, in a statement from NASCAR.
“We listen to the drivers. We have stakeholders in the broadcast, OEM (manufacturers) and team competition and team business folks, so there’s always no shortage of feedback that we get. Our fans are very passionate, they provide very candid feedback, so that all is very important to us. We do listen to it.
“We are working on a lot of things in the background, we don’t often always talk about them until we’re ready to come out and announce an implementation plan for them. Their feedback is very important.”
