More horsepower: NASCAR VP Elton Sawyer tips his hand, but there's a caveat

Elton Sawyer, NASCAR‘s senior vice president of competition, said Tuesday that increasing horsepower in the Next Gen car at short tracks is a priority for the 2026 season. Sawyer said on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio that the biggest challenge is determining which racetracks would get the short track increase.

“We’re always trying to make our racing — whether it’s short track, road course, intermediate, superspeedway — we want to make it better. We feel like we have a really good product right now, but we want to build on that. We still have some work to do,” Sawyer said. “We’ve discussed many times about horsepower on the short tracks and that’s something that’s an ongoing discussion with our industry stakeholders, Toyota, Ford and Chevy, as well as our engine builder and our race teams. Feel like we’re having positive conversations; there’s still a lot that goes into that. Obviously, that’s a 2026 initiative to get that across the line.

“So, we still continue to have very positive conversations around that and some of it boils down to if you look at a Martinsville, you look at a Richmond — it’s pretty straightforward because that’s a short track. But then, you look at a Loudon, and Loudon is a mile, but it races like a short track, so does it fall into that same bucket? We have to look at racetracks like that — Dover — it’s a mile racetrack, but speeds are up there. Is that also in that engine package that may be on the short track? … We’re optimistic that we’re going to get there, but still a little bit more work to do on that.”

NASCAR hopeful of horsepower increase for 2026 season

As far back as 2015, NASCAR has incrementally decreased the horsepower of engines capable of producing over 900. Except for high-banked drafting tracks, NASCAR caps engines at 670 horsepower.

NASCAR has previously argued against a horsepower increase for years. They have mainly claimed that the 670-horsepower package is set up to attract new manufacturers to the sport. There’s also concerns of cost. Sawyer, however, did say in May that more horsepower was “on the table.”

Mike Forde, NASCAR’s managing director of racing communications, said that talks of going up to 900 or 1000 horsepower are off the table. What is on the table, as Sawyer said, is a slight increase.

“Well, I’m sure that’s going to come up too,” Forde said on Hauler Talk. “I’m sure that [horsepower] will come up this weekend, and that’s something that we’re going to look at seriously. You hear levels of 900, 1000 horsepower, whatever, I don’t know if that’s – that’s not on the table just because of the cost.

“But there’s some conversation of, can you go up to 750? That’s something that I’m sure we’ll discuss with the drivers, too. I don’t want to make any promises or get anyone’s hopes up, but that is, we seriously listen to the drivers and their feedback, and we’ll see what we can do there.”