NASCAR uses a specially sourced, unleaded fuel blend of gasoline and ethanol, known as the Sunoco Green E15 (commonly called the Green E15 due to its color) which caters to the needs of the high-performance engines of the race cars. Just that one piece of information is enough to make the fans wheel their heads wondering how much the NASCAR teams spend on acquiring this special-grade fuel for the races throughout the entire season.
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It must be a lot. Surely, the entire season consists of 38 races, which range from 37 miles to 600 miles in distance. For a bigshot team like Joe Gibbs Racing, this adds up to over 13,000 miles per season for one car. In a Joe Gibbs Racing video, the team revealed, “We have four cars in each race. This adds up to 52,000 miles per season. There’s many variables to fuel mileage but we assume five miles per gallon. That’s 10,400 gallons of fuel. This doesn’t include fuel used in practice or qualifying.”
Now, let’s look at how expensive the green E15 actually is. According to reports, the basic fuel price in America is somewhere between $3.6 to $3.10 per gallon. Whereas, the fuel that the NASCAR teams obtain from the Sonoco stations at the track costs about 16 to 17 dollars per gallon, which is almost 6 times the usual price of fuel in the States. But here’s where things get even wilder.
As a conclusion to the video, the team admitted, “Fortunately, we get our fuel for free. So we actually spend zero dollars a year on race fuel.” Thanks to NASCAR, the teams are waived an extra burden of about $175,000 per year just for the main events.
Here’s how NASCAR is different from F1 in terms of fuel allowance per race
To level up the field for all the cars, Formula 1 has set a limit to the amount of fuel that the cars can use per race. Since 2019, that limit is 110 kilograms of fuel per race and they aren’t allowed to refuel mid race. However, team’s don’t often fill that much fuel in the cars. After all, the more fuel in the cars, the worse its performance during the early stages of the race. Instead they opt for other fuel saving measures during the race such as the lift-and-coast tactic or strategic fuel modes.
This is where NASCAR differs. The teams are allowed to fill as much fuel as they want in their cars before the race starts. Additionally, they can also refuel their cars during pit stops. The fuel tanks of the next-gen stock car hold roughly 18 US gallons of fuel.
But again, the NASCAR teams too, attempt to put in just the correct amount of fuel needed to run the laps before coming back to the pit lane for a refuel, so that the teams don’t lose lap time. With so much control given to the teams to refuel their cars whenever they need to, there isn’t really a way to determine the total fuel usage of a NASCAR car in a race.
