NASCAR’s Electric Bugaloo: EV Prototype Makes Its Public Debut In Chicago

NASCAR is fully jumping on the ‘Save Mother Earth’ bandwagon. The sport finally debuted its prototype all-electric vehicle to the masses Saturday in Chicago ahead of its second ever Chicago Street Course race, which, by the way, will still feature cars that aren’t anywhere near all-electric.

And for those fans eager to hear nothing but the whine of electric race cars on track, it seems they will have to wait a bit longer.

The EV reveal was supposed to happen this past February in Los Angeles, but in a strange bit of irony, Mother Nature decided against that, instead pouring down enough rain to get the attention of Noah and shortening the entire event to just a single day.

Saturday’s EV reveal wasn’t even the main event. Instead, it was tucked into part of the announcement that NASCAR has partnered with ABB to launch what they are calling an “electrification innovation partnership,” the goal of which is to “create opportunities for electrification in the sport”. This will include electrification infrastructure, education, and oh, by the way that electric race car.

ABB will assist NASCAR in evolving its office, track, racing competition, and long-haul transportation operations into more sustainable spaces meant to help the sport achieve its stated goal of having a zero-carbon footprint across its core operations by the year 2035. By the way, 2035 is also the same year the U.S. government has targeted as its own goal to reduce its carbon footprint to zero; a footprint that is the size of a Sasquatch as opposed to that of a hamster.

The prototype shown to the world on Saturday is an All-Wheel Drive car that has a generic Crossover Utility Vehicle (CUV) body made of sustainable flax-based composite that sits atop a modified Next Gen chassis with steering, suspension, brakes, and wheels that all originate from the current NASCAR Cup series car. It has three STARD UHP 6-Phase motors (one front, two rear) supplying power directly to all four specially designed Goodyear Racing Eagle tires. Anchored by a 78-kWh liquid-cooled battery, the tunable powertrain can produce 1,000 kW at peak power. Regenerative braking converts kinetic energy into power, which will be useful for road courses and short oval tracks.

All three of NASCAR’s OEMs had input on the car’s development, and it has been tested on track at Charlotte Motor Speedway, Hickory and at Martinsville by former full-time driver turned NASCAR electric vehicle test driver David Ragan. The car also did turn some laps at the L.A. Coliseum but in a top-secret operation. Saturday, fans, and the rest of the industry, got a chance to see the prototype up close. Something they won’t be seeing anytime soon, however, is a race featuring a field of nothing but those prototypes.

NASCAR is in the business of racing stock cars. Those are cars that look and operate like what you can go buy at a local dealership, or in the last few years one of those odd-looking oversized car vending machines seen on the side of the highway. And while the OEMs in NASCAR have all started making and selling electric and hybrid cars, the truth is the current market share of EVs in America is only 6.8% as of May this year. And in that same Q1 the U.S. share of EVs and hybrid sales decreased over the year prior. Thus, the adage once uttered like one of the Ten Commandments in NASCAR, “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday” isn’t really valid. At least not yet.

NASCAR has also always been somewhat slow to change with the rest of the automotive world. They used lead fuel until 2007, even though it had been banned on the street in 1975; and they ran carburetors atop their engines in the Cup series until 2012. The last new carbureted street vehicle sold in America was a 1994 model Isuzu pickup. And since 2011 NASCAR has used E15, an unleaded fuel with a 15% ethanol blend.

A goal of NASCAR’s sustainability plan is for the sport to move operations from what they term as scope 1 (fuel burned) to scope 2 (electric) for its on-track product. It makes sense then that the next step in NASCAR’s green evolution on the track won’t be an all-electric car but be a switch to hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel that leaves no carbon footprint. Last year Toyota, one of NASCAR’s OEMs, debuted a hydrogen fueled race car in the TKU Super Taikyu Race, an amateur-driven, production-based endurance sports car series that is similar to grassroots racing in America. And NASCAR executives traveled to Japan to see it.

“The enemy is not the internal combustion engine (ICE). The enemy is carbon,” David Wilson, group vice president and president of Toyota Racing Development, U.S.A., told Forbes earlier this year. “There are supplemental technologies like hydrogen that can be run with an internal combustion engine with basically a zero-carbon footprint. So, we are not abandoning the internal combustion engine. I’ll state that just unequivocally.”

The final step before moving to scope 2, and something that could become a reality in just a few short years, is NASCAR stock cars racing hybrid powertrains. An internal combustion engine in combination with some sort of electric power add-on is already being raced in Formula 1, and most recently in IndyCar. NASCAR has made no secret of the fact that its Next Gen car was designed with just such a system in mind, and that, rather than an all-electric car, seems the next logical, and readily achievable step.

“I think the ICE engine will be a common denominator for years to come,” Wilson said. “It could be supplemented with some sort of a hybrid component. It could be supplemented with a greener fuel (like) hydrogen. I think within five to 10 years, hydrogen could be a real potential solution… we’re actively just looking at the capabilities and the infrastructure requirement and a lot of the associated technologies that you need to sort out in order to race in anger. But I do not see the ICE engine component going away anytime soon.”

So, Saturday’s announcement wasn’t about a new all-electric series. It was about continuing the journey towards Saving Mother Earth. NASCAR wants to be sourcing 100% renewable electricity at the racetracks and facilities it owns by 2028 under the shadow of that 2035 target. ABB will assist with all of that.

In the coming years, fans will see snippets of electrification in the sport. More “green” facilities that use solar energy, more charging stations at tracks, and more electric vehicles, but only electric vehicles taking NASCAR executives and officials to a track, or lunch perhaps. Not actually on the track.

Expect to see crumbs everywhere at a track about the world of electrification with the prototype being a slice of the electric pie as time marches on. Whether the next generation of fans will be sitting in the grandstands at Charlotte Motor Speedway talking in normal voices as EVs with bodies made from flowers rush by is still a dream at this point. And given the current contentious political climate in America, if a new political party takes office in November, the stated U.S. goal of a zero-carbon footprint by 2035 could become like a sasquatch disappearing into the woods. And perhaps give NASCAR less motivation to meet their own stated goal.

For now, EV racing in NASCAR is an Electric Bugaloo, little more than flash and show. Whether it ever becomes more than that is just a work in progress with no real end in sight.