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NASCAR Cup Series managing director Brad Moran said fixing fuel saving at superspeedways will “probably be project number one for the off season” after cars in the main pack dropped below minimum speed in the opening stage at Talladega Superspeedway. He said NASCAR is looking at adding a stage or changing the size of fuel cells.
Moran made the comments on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio on Wednesday.
Moran: ‘We want to correct that’
“We want to correct that,” Moran said. “It’s all got to do with strategy, fuel mileage, one can. There’s so much engineering in the sport now, which has made some great improvements, but there’s some downsides to it. This would be one of them.”
Moran said NASCAR warned teams during the race, through its messaging system, that cars running below minimum speed would be black-flagged if they did not pick up the pace.
“There’s not much we could do about it with the current rules and the way things are set up for 2026, but we, ourselves and the entire industry, are going to figure it out,” he said. “We’re going to come up with a fix for it. And that’ll probably be project number one for the off season.”
What could change
Moran named two options and said any fix has to be one teams cannot work around.
“First of all, you know, adding another stage, yes, that would be one way to correct it. Whether broadcast partners in the industry would like to go in that direction. It’s a possibility,” Moran said. “We could look at different-size fuel cells. There are different ways to do it, but you need to have a way that can’t be beat.”
“So there are tools, there are things that we could do that are going to probably be quite a change if we do any of them, but we are going to do something to correct the problem.”
What happened at Talladega
Most of the field saved fuel through the 98-lap first stage of Sunday’s YellaWood 500. RFK Racing‘s Chris Buescher, Ryan Preece and Brad Keselowski ran flat out together instead and finished the stage 1-2-3. Preece said afterward that teams would never let that happen again, as Pit This Time reported.
NASCAR had already changed the stage lengths for this race to match the spring Talladega race, with stages ending on Laps 98, 143 and 188, to reduce fuel saving. It also cut the spoiler for Talladega to 3.5 inches. Former championship crew chief Cole Pearn suggested during the race that superspeedway races be called with “no engineers, no internet.”
What’s next
The next superspeedway race is the Daytona 500 in February. The Cup Series races next at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia, on Sunday, November 1, at 2 p.m. ET on NBC.
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