NASCAR chief suggests O'Reilly Series could go electric

NASCAR has been doing a great job of getting fans back on board in the last six months...until now?

NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer John Probst has now raised the idea of using the sport's new EV prototype as a model for the O'Reilly Series in the future, citing a lack of 'brand identity' for the sport's second series.

The 1,360-horsepower prototype was on display at the Chicago Street Race last year, but fans online were vociferously against it being used to replace the current O'Reilly car – complaining that a car that looks like a hatchback has no place near the top of the NASCAR ladder.

Probst raised the idea in an interview with the Sports Business Journal's Adam Stern, with some moderate voices keen to stress that the idea is currently just that: an idea, yet to be put into motion at anything more than a conceptual level.

NASCAR VP considering radical O'Reilly Series change

The key part of Stern's report read: "With NASCAR’s R&D unit building its first electric vehicle, it is constantly meeting with incumbent and prospective OEMs. Probst said NASCAR is evaluating the potential of one day using its crossover utility vehicle EV in the second-tier O’Reilly Auto Parts series to give that division a better brand identity."

Probst himself said of the potential for the move: “There is certainly a needle to be threaded there along the line of entertainment and sport, and maybe you can even go beyond sport and just say pure engineering.

"I think for us, I feel like we don’t need to be on the absolute bleeding edge of powertrain technology to be relevant to our OEMs and also be entertaining to our fans.”

John Probst: O'Reilly Series has an identity problem

Probst further added: "If you look at the brand identity of those three, the O'Reilly Series struggles a little bit just from the car perspective and you see it a lot because we refer to it often as whoever the entitlement sponsor is."

"Long term, you see it as, we do have that CUV [crossover utility vehicle] body that we developed for our electric vehicle.

"I’m not sitting here saying today we’re breaking news it’s going to CUV, but these are the things that are on the roadmap to consider, so you’d have a Truck, a CUV and a Cup, that’s three very different bodies that are relevant for our OEMs today to create that brand identity for each series."