Earlier this week, buzz began circulating around the NASCAR world in regards to a very old topic: new manufacturer interest. With Ford, Chevy and Toyota as the baseline, many believe that the sport needs new blood to grow the right way.
Those people would be correct. NASCAR is at a crossroads in the sense of manufacturer participation. Plenty has changed about the sport in the last decade and even more beyond that, but one thing has remained the same: the powertrains of big, thumping V8 engines that rattle racetrack walls have always been at the center of it all.
That noise has become synonymous with NASCAR and its history, but now, all that could be about to change. Adam Stern of Sports Business Journal reported earlier this week that NASCAR could make the move to a different powertrain model as soon as 2026 or 2027.
What would NASCAR’s most viable options be, and what manufacturers would be interested in a switch?
The two main manufacturers that NASCAR has been in talks with in terms of joining the current stable are reportedly Honda and Hyundai. Honda has a rich motorsport history of its own, and Hyundai is making plenty of moves in the auto industry as of late to better position itself to benefit from motorsport participation.
The rub for those two global automotive titans, though, is the powertrain. Neither will join with the current setups in place, and why should they? Every tuned-in NASCAR fan has heard about Toyota’s nonexistent V8 Camry, and Honda or Hyundai would have the same issue. The original saying has always been win on Sunday, sell on Monday, but with none of their production vehicles harboring something remotely close to the engines used in the NASCAR Cup Series, those benefits significantly decrease.
Toyota has used NASCAR to boost the sale of its TRD Camry line, but outside of that, the titan of the industry has no pushrod V8s in cars that customers can buy on the lot. Honda and Hyundai would be in that same boat out of the gate, and that’s not exactly good for business.
What Toyota would probably prefer, though, is to take some of the turbocharged hybrid engines that are…
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