Elton Sawyer counters NASCAR horsepower debate with Dale Earnhardt Jr. as short tracks come into focus

NASCAR senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer believes that the key to improving short track racing in the Next Gen car isn’t centered around increased horsepower.

Sawyer, speaking on “The Dale Jr. Download” this week with Dale Earnhardt Jr., said that NASCAR can use the races at Bristol and Richmond from earlier this season as data points for why it’s important to get the tires right, rather than increase horsepower.

“If you take Bristol — great data point — then you go to Richmond where we start the race on wet weather tires, the first 30 laps of that at Richmond it looked like Richmond of old. They were all over the place,” Sawyer said. “So OK, you take that, and we start to see we’re not changing aero bits [and] we’re still close to 700 horsepower. The dialogue around we need 1,000 horsepower — there’s gonna be significant cost to put 1,000 horsepower in these cars. It just is. I know there’s debate back and forth but it’s gonna happen.

“So, if we can get where we wanna be with the tire working closely with Goodyear and we feel like we can because we see it, so continuing to push hard in that area to get us the type of racing on short tracks that our fans deserve and our competitors want to see like we just saw at Kansas last weekend.”

Elton Sawyer says NASCAR needs to ‘work harder’ to improve short track racing package

NASCAR debuted a new aero package for short tracks and road courses in the Cup Series this season. The new package includes a simplified diffuser on the Next Gen car, the elimination of engine panel strakes, more simplified diffuser strakes and a 3-inch spoiler.

The one short track race this season which didn’t use the new short track package, was the Food City 500 at Bristol. In that race, tire wear was extreme, which drew favorable reviews from drivers and fans.

Sawyer said after the Cook Out 400 at Martinsville last month that NASCAR needs to “work harder” on improving the racing at short tracks.

“We’re not naive to this,” Sawyer said. “We as NASCAR want our short track package to be better. We want that racing to be at the level that superspeedways and our intermediate racetracks are today. I promise you we are working as hard as we can with Goodyear, and we need to work harder. That’s the bottom line.

“We need to work harder to come to a place, whereas I said a couple of weeks ago, we need to figure out how to bottle up what we learned at Bristol and also what we learned the first 30 laps at Richmond last week on how that race unfolded. The tires and the way they wear and the way the drivers have to manage that tire wear and the tire fall off is really what we’re trying to achieve.”