NASCAR Cup Series Managing Director Brad Moran discusses possibility of adding horsepower

“It’s been talked about, you know, more and more horsepower,” Moran started. “Smaller tires equate to the same thing. You get the same results when you’re done. But in changing the plate and increasing the horsepower, that sounds relatively easy to do, and that part is certainly easy to do. But once we open up the horsepower, we have to have all three manufacturers obviously on board.

“As soon as you open that up, there’s, you know, there’s going to be development. There’s going to be reliability issues. All of these, you know, again, putting that cost back into the engine, engine builders, you know, into the engine builders category, where they certainly will develop, and you start developing the engine. As soon as you open any horsepower up, they’re automatically going to do that. They’re the best at it. And that’s what they want to do it.”

In addition to the change forcing teams to operate under a new system, Moran also believes adjusting the horsepower could damage any potential of adding a new manufacturer to the sport, which NASCAR is aiming to do, with Honda a major candidate.

“The number we’re at seems to be where we want to be to try to, you know, get potentially new manufacturers interested in,” Moran added. “If we start getting away from that number it can create problems in that area. But we’re always, you know, we’re always open to everything.

“We do consider everything and the engine gets talked about quite often. But there’s a lot of different parties that have to agree before that one can happen.”

It’s evident there’s a lot more hoops that NASCAR will have to jump through before figuring out whether they can add horsepower or not. Regardless, it seems like it wouldn’t hurt to try, especially with multiple drivers clamoring for it week-in and week-out. We’ll see what they decide in the future.