It’s taken three and a half seasons but a NASCAR official has finally expressed a conviction that the Sanctioning Body believes a horsepower increase is needed on short tracks for the NextGen car.
The statement came from Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, following a largely procedural race at Iowa Speedway where a vast majority of passing came via pit strategy.
“It’s something that is an ongoing discussion with our industry stakeholders,” Sawyer said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Tuesday, “Our folks at Toyota, Ford, and Chevy, as well as our engine builders and our race teams. I feel like we’re having positive conversations. There is still a lot that goes into that, obviously it’s a 2026 initiative to get that across the line, so we still continue to have very positive conversations around that.”
Sawyer says NASCAR, and all the aforementioned stakeholders, need to determine which tracks most need the treatment. For example, Dover and New Hampshire are both one mile but the former currently uses the intermediate track package and the latter uses a short track package.
Gateway and Darlington both have short track attributes too but are larger than a mile.
Regardless of where NASCAR decides to land on increasing horsepower from 670 to the 750 range, Sawyer said there are too many variables to make this change for the rest of this season.
“I don’t see that happening,” Sawyer said. “Just as I went through there, all the reasons and getting everyone together and being able to get all those boxed checked, and making sure we do it right.”
“We still have to make sure that that’s first and foremost, that it is the right thing, which we believe it is. We’ve got a lot of feedback from a lot of different stakeholders; some have stronger opinions than others. So, you have to weight that, as well.”