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NASCAR Has 10 Years to Go Carbon Neutral. Has the Movement Already Begun?
Join us for a brief history of NASCAR and its alternative-fuel initiative. It only began a couple of years ago, but a lot has happened in a very short time, some of it in the past several days.
As we dutifully reported, NASCAR said it was introducing its electric race car at the Busch Light Clash at the LA Memorial Coliseum event on Sunday, February 4, 2024. It didn’t happen. Faced with seriously bad weather on Sunday, NASCAR moved the event up to Saturday, and in the scramble, the NASCAR electric vehicle was more or less forgotten. At the time, the only photos of the car were spy shots that popped up on Reddit showing a greenish SUV with a huge wing on the back.
The car finally debuted on July 6, 2024, at NASCAR’s Chicago street race. It wore a wrap with ABB on the side. On its website, the Zurich, Switzerland-based ABB describes itself like this: “In collaboration with our customers, partners and suppliers, we address the world’s energy challenges, transform industries and embed sustainability in everything we do.” At the Chicago race, ABB and NASCAR announced a partnership called “NASCAR Impact, a platform driving sustainability initiatives across the sport. This supports NASCAR’s plan to reduce its own carbon operating footprint to zero by 2035.”
The EV was “developed in collaboration with NASCAR’s OEM partners—Chevrolet, Ford, and Toyota—and was built by the NASCAR engineers responsible for the Next Gen car and the Garage 56 entry into the 24 Hours of Le Mans.”
The all-wheel-drive car sits atop a modified NASCAR chassis. It’s powered by a 78-kWh liquid-cooled battery running three motors, with a claimed power output of about 1340 horsepower.
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Fast-forward to January 30, 2025. At the second annual Ford Performance preview at Charlotte Motor Speedway, with very little fanfare and even fewer details, the company announced its “EV NASCAR Prototype,” based on the electric Mach-E and featuring “components from the current Cup Series car including suspension, brakes, steering and wheels.” Like the ABB electric racer, it also features three motors, all-wheel drive, more than 1200 horsepower, and a 78-kWh battery.
And then on February 13, at the Daytona International Speedway, Chevrolet debuted its “Blazer EV.R NASCAR Prototype,” which, like the Ford and the ABB vehicles, is basically a crossover SUV with a huge wing on the back. All three vehicles appear to be built to the same specifications: The all-wheel-drive Chevrolet “delivers over 1300 horsepower from three six-phase electric motors that instantly rev up to 15,000 rpm, powered by a 78-kWh liquid-cooled battery.”
Given the near-identical nature of the three NASCAR EV Prototypes, it’s obvious that something is afoot, though Eric Warren, executive director of global motorsports competition for General Motors, says change is not that imminent. “While we will continue to race our proven and winning V-8 technology in NASCAR for years to come, we continually look for ways to improve the combination of power, durability, and efficiency to transfer learnings from the racetrack to the showroom, especially as we bolster Chevy’s consumer EV lineup,” he said.
NASCAR executives are playing it all close to the vest. “NASCAR and its manufacturer partners are passionate about emerging technologies, and working to remain on the forefront of innovation,” said Brandon Thomas, NASCAR vice president of vehicle design. “With the Blazer EV.R NASCAR prototype, Chevrolet and its engineers meshed new technologies with the NASCAR Next Gen platform—and the result is a powerful, exciting vehicle that we believe fans will love when they see it at Daytona International Speedway.”
We’ll likely see hybrid NASCAR Cup cars sooner rather than later, especially since a modest hybrid system has proven reliable in the NASCAR-owned IMSA sports car series, where the top class, GTP, uses electricity to leave the pits.
Since NASCAR has pledged to reduce its carbon footprint to zero by 2035, there are several ways to do this on track, and all require a change from the petroleum-based gasoline that powers NASCAR today. One way, obviously, is electricity, but maintaining the current type of racing NASCAR does now would require a battery that could run at top speed for hundreds of miles, which is likely a long way off. In the near future, it’s more likely we could see these NASCAR EV Prototypes on road courses and short ovals, running races that are under an hour. The Formula E open-wheel series has managed that, but those cars are far lighter than electric NASCAR Cup cars would be.
Another zero-footprint option is hydrogen, which would allow NASCAR to continue to use proper-sounding V-8s, and NASCAR and its manufacturing partners are actively exploring that. As we reported a year ago, Toyota is at the forefront of hydrogen-powered racing, and several NASCAR officials made a trip to Japan last year to watch the company’s hydrogen-powered cars compete in an endurance event.
Toyota has been racing hydrogen-powered cars since 2021. Hydrogen may appeal more to NASCAR than battery power, since the engines would still make noise. We haven’t seen an electric NASCAR prototype from Toyota yet; if and when it arrives, that prototype could have hydrogen power.
And the final route to carbon zero is through artificially sourced synthetic fuel, a technology that has Porsche at the forefront. Porsche opened an eFuel plant in Chile in 2022, the world’s first.
It makes gasoline “by splitting water into its constituent components of hydrogen and oxygen in the first step,” Porsche says. “It releases the latter into the atmosphere, in the words of one of the engineers in Chile, ‘like a synthetic tree,’ and then combines the hydrogen with CO₂ that would otherwise be in the atmosphere to methanol. A final process then turns that methanol into gasoline.” Last April, eFuel began powering all 32 of the 911 GT3 Cup race cars in the Porsche Supercup series at each of the eight racing events in Europe. Porsche began experimenting with eFuels in race cars in 2021.
The Catchfence.com NASCAR website reported Sunday that a fourth manufacturer has approached NASCAR with interest in joining the series. Could it be Volkswagen, which came very close to entering NASCAR with driver Kurt Busch and team owner Michael Andretti, but was derailed by the 2015 “Dieselgate” scandal? If so, the eFuel work done by Volkswagen AG-owned Porsche might appeal to the sanctioning body.
By far, though, electricity is the most developed, although it’s the only one that doesn’t make the proper roar.
Still, signals abound. The official pace car for the 2025 Daytona 500 was the Chevrolet Blazer SS, a 615-horsepower EV. “Chevrolet has been using the SS designation since 1961,” said Fox lead announcer Mike Joy during the race, “and this is the quickest one ever!”
And on race day, NASCAR announced that it had installed 30 level 2 electric vehicle chargers at its Daytona Beach headquarters. “This signifies a step forward in the organization’s commitment to sustainability through NASCAR Impact, a plan that aims to reduce NASCAR’s carbon footprint to zero across NASCAR core operations by 2035,” the announcement said, ahead of “NASCAR’s transition to electric fleet vehicles. NASCAR is exploring sustainable racing fuels, expanded recycling programs at tracks, and energy-efficient technologies at its facilities. These efforts reflect the organization’s long-term vision to make motorsports more environmentally sustainable.”
It remains to be seen how quickly all that happens. NASCAR has 10 years to reach its zero-carbon footprint, and when it occurs, it’ll be with one of the technologies mentioned above. NASCAR can make that happen, but can it convince its hydrocarbon-loving fan base to follow? Seems like maybe that process has already begun.
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If a race was held but no one was there did it really happen?
Racing is about the noise and smell.
Imagine drag racing with no Nitro Methane?
I was at the track when the Electric 1/4 mile record was set. No one cared.
At the grassroots level, Tesla events are invaded by ICE cars.
The bets are made and the racing is usually pretty entertaining.
Most of the Tesla clubs quit advertising because the same group would show up with their roll race rides or other insanity.
2,000 hp isn’t really much any more.
Especially on E85 or Methanol.
My twin turbo 387 LSx is a new build and still barely mid-pack in the boosted LS/LT HP world.
Go Electric & watch your fan base disappear. It’s long past time to end this ECO nonsense.