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NASCAR announces horsepower increase at select racetracks for 2026 season

ProfilePhotoby: Nick Geddes10/08/25NickGeddesNews
Horsepower
Scott Kinser-Imagn Images

After months of speculation, it’s official: NASCAR will increase horsepower in the Next Gen car at road courses and racetracks less than 1.5 miles for the 2026 Cup Series season. NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell revealed in an interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. that those tracks will have 750 horsepower.

The list of tracks is as follows: 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 and Charlotte Motor Speedway Road Course.

O’Donnell explained why 750 horsepower is the right amount for now. He said that while fans might want more, the cost is ultimately what drove them to this decision.

“So, why 750? Why not 800? Why not 1000? So, if you look at where we are today, where we can go without completely changing over the industry, and so whatever you do, you want to make sure that if you’re going to change the horsepower within the car, you gotta match it up with the aero, you gotta match it up with your braking, all these different things come into play. We hear the fans, we hear the industry,” O’Donnell said. “Yes, we want to try and see what will work here. … If you went beyond 750, we looked at almost $40-50 million cost to the industry.

“And so, if you look at our job is yeah, you want to make a call right away, but you got to think about the out years. And so, we’re looking at Dodge coming into the sport, we’re looking at other OEMs coming into the sport, and then our current partners. Three-year runway, we didn’t wanna say, ‘Alright, it’s 1000 now and then just kidding, three years from now we’re changing it again.’ That’s hundreds of millions of dollars to the industry, so that’s why.

“I know fans [say], ‘Who cares about the money, just do it.’ But in this case, we want to take a step, we want to marry that up with aero. So, we’re gonna do a test in the offseason at North Wilkesboro. I think some of the drivers are happy about that, just looking at what can we do with the tires now. Goodyear’s stepping up. Not perfect, right, but they’ve stepped up. So, putting some ideas together, going and trying it at North Wilkesboro and see what happens.”

Big changes coming to NASCAR in 2026

As far back as 2015, NASCAR has incrementally decreased the horsepower of engines capable of producing over 900. NASCAR has capped engines at 670 horsepower since the introduction of the Next Gen car in 2022.

Elton Sawyer, NASCAR’s senior vice president of competition, said in May that more horsepower was “on the table.” Wednesday, it became a reality.

“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. “We listen to the drivers. We have stakeholders in the broadcast, OEM 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.”