NASCAR official reveals sport uses AI to deal with fan feedback

A high-ranked NASCAR executive has revealed that the sport now uses AI to help deal with feedback from various sources.

NASCAR executive vice president and chief racing development officer John Probst was speaking about the way that the sport is attempting to modernize going forward, and how they weigh feedback from teams and fans.

Probst revealed – in that very vague way that organizations tend to employ when talking about AI use cases – that the sport 'uses AI to make sure everyone's feedback is taken into account'.

What does that mean? Well, probably nothing that we can tell, in broad terms. Most likely they're just getting a summary of social media feedback delivered to them. However, since AI tends to tell its users what they want to hear...don't expect negative feedback online to reach NASCAR unless it's really negative.

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NASCAR official: We will always listen to fans

Probst told the Sports Business Journal's Adam Stern: “We will forever listen to our fans. We listen to them every week. We have our fan council. We now use AI to make sure we’re taking everyone’s feedback into account, and we will respond.

"But the concept of changing one thing and [everything] is going to be fixed ... we’ve done enough research – and frankly, we’ve done enough changes, even with the onset of the new car – that there is no magic bullet, no magic horsepower level.

"There is no magic fall-off number. There is no magic aero or downforce number. But it is a package, so we will continue to iterate on it.”

John Probst hints NASCAR could go electric

Probst also revealed that NASCAR could explore a move to the sport's EV prototype for the O'Reilly Series, saying: “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.”

He 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."