Kevin Harvick's Happy Hour presented by NASCAR on FOX - EXCLUSIVE: Steve O’Donnell on Carson Hocevar vs. Ryan Blaney, The Chase Return & NASCAR's Future

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

NASCAR CEO Steve O’Donnell joins Kevin Harvick on Harvick Happy Hour for an exclusive, wide-ranging discussion on the current state and future of stock car racing. Following a heated Bristol race, O’Donnell addresses the intense altercations on track—including why NASCAR chose not to penalize Carson Hocevar or Ryan Blaney after their post-race fight. Plus, O’Donnell shares insights into his early tenure as NASCAR’s Chief Executive, key takeaways from his first 90 days, the return of The Chase, upcoming schedule innovations, and what fans can expect for the sport heading toward 2032. Chapters: 00:00 - Intro 01:04 - Impression of Bristol 01:39 - Reaction to Blaney vs. Hocevar Fight & No Penalties 03:46 - NASCAR Garage & Competition Perception on Calls 04:46 - Expectations for NASCAR’s Future 06:19 - Takeaways from Daytona Rules Package 07:17 - Future of Short Track Racing 09:01 - Biggest Surprise as CEO 10:46 - NASCAR Development Pipeline 13:12 - Updates for Practice, Qualifying & Testing 14:09 - Evolution of the NASCAR Schedule 17:26 - Engaging with Other Racing Series 18:43 - Steve’s Go-To Person: Mike Helton 23:34 - Days of Thunder 2 24:18 - Early Reaction to The Chase Format 26:18 - Transparency with NASCAR Fans Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We've been on record, you know. Drivers need to handle their business outside of the car. What we are going to encourage is passion, right? And those are two guys, you know, Blaney's showing his passion, showing his fire. I don't know that I've ever had a Mike Hilton conversation that he doesn't have some sort of diplomatic answers. The one thing I'm learning about Mike, that that's true. You look at the hell yeah campaign and you look at the swear jar and you're not apologizing for it anymore. You're really just like, hey, if you like us, you like us. If you don't, go find something else.

I think it's true to who we are. People see that. California's Kevin Harvick does it. Welcome to Kevin Harvick's happy hour presented by NASCAR and Fox for a special episode with Steve O'Donnell. Thanks for taking the time to coming to talk to us today. Thanks for having me, man. I've been looking forward to this. Yeah. Well, you came in a great week for us to talk about just a, well, just an incredible ending to the Bristol race, not only on the racetrack, but off of the racetrack.

And what was the overall impression of Saturday night's events? I think, you know, all in all, really looking at the entire weekend, felt like more enthusiasm. Crowd was good, a lot of energy. The race, for the most part, I think, played out really well. I like to see a little more tire wear maybe, you know, when Joey, that first, you know, you get out there, don't think he should be able to stay on the same tires, right, and hold everybody off, something we can work on.

But then the battles throughout the field were really good and certainly a lot of drama there coming to the end. And, you know, didn't expect what happened post-race for sure. Yeah, I think when you look at post-race and, you know, Ryan Blaney being the one that started, I would have never had that on my bingo card. And, you know, being in those situations before and being in the trailer with you before and,

understanding the scenario, I mean, where does NASCAR sit on the whole scenario with the two drivers having the altercation? I don't, to me, the crew guys were just trying to break it up. It didn't, glad it didn't spread into two crews fighting. I mean, I think that's really where you guys have the biggest problem, right? Totally agree. I think, you know, don't use your car as a weapon, so to speak, right? I mean, we know, Brad Kozlowski incident in Talladega, you know, with Carl Edwards, you know, those type of things. We don't want to see that a right hook. You don't want to see that. But we've been on record, you know, the drivers need to handle their business outside of the car. We don't want crew members.

You know, you got a lot of big guys coming out of D1 football. No chance with those guys. Yeah, jumping on. So, you know, if drivers are going to handle their own business, you know, the way we looked at that, how it played out, you know, we're not going to encourage fighting. But what we are going to encourage is passion, right? And those are two guys, you know, Blaney's showing his passion, showing his fire. So, no, there's nothing coming from us in terms of, you know, we'll obviously watch what happens, you know, the rest of the way. but nothing in terms of post-race penalty.

The best part to me, I've known you for a long time. We've known each other for a long time. And, you know, I think that good, bad, we always wind up in a good spot. We might be mad at each other for a little while. But, I mean, to me, that's healthy. To be able to, for me to always be able to voice my opinion to you, might make you mad, and you do the same to me.

But since you have taken over this whole thing, we have seen some quick reactions. And I think whether it's the spoiler and the car rules at Daytona, the caution rules, whatever. I mean, there's been a lot of things that have piled up into those decisions. Has that been something that you guys have talked about internally? And I think that initially everybody was like, oh, they did it the first time. And so how has that gone over? Because I know with the charter systems and the teams, it can be a struggle.

How has the whole garage perceived that? Yeah, I think it's a great question. I'd start off with, I think we've got a really good team, right? So it's easy to try and make some quicker decisions when you feel like the right information and the team can execute it. Yeah. But it's also going out and yeah, I've been on a listening tour. But I think what I've learned from that is a lot of good ideas.

You can listen to all those. That doesn't mean you're going to agree with everything, but you can at least get enough input. And when you've got a number of people saying, what are we waiting for? Let's make these moves. You know you can execute it. You also know you're not always going to be right. But we'll undo that. And I think, you know, we're going to move quick.

I've told everybody, you know, we're talking about where we want to go in the future. But we've got to go. And we've got some momentum. But the worst thing we could do is just kind of sit around and say, hey, things are trending good. We got to be true to who we are. I think we got away from that in the past. But if you're making decisions, and, you know, I've learned a lot from you, Kevin. If you're making decisions that people believe, yeah, that's NASCAR and they're moving in that direction, I think we're going to be winning.

Yeah. And, you know, when you look at the moving part, what do you think the, the you've moved all so many things um what do you think the biggest thing as we move forward what's going to be the hey here's the here's the main thing that we need to focus on as we move into 2027 yeah i think um 2027 will be more of taking advantage of what's out there looking at all these ideas and then if we can get the industry and that's a lot of people that it's drivers teams tracks right oEMs if i ask you or rick hendrick or joe gibbs you know where are we going in 2028. I don't know. That's our fault. But if I talked about, you know, what should we do for

testing for the Daytona 500, we'd have a good idea. So the goal is really to get as many people as possible saying, here are the top five things we got to work on as a sport. Everybody agree on that. We may get there a different way, but if everyone kind of knows this is what we're trying to do, how many races, where we race, how long are races, what's the future car, you know, all those things that we can at least talk about because we've made decisions in the past, like, you know, let's cut a set of tires to save some money. Yeah. Well, what did that just do, right?

Took away track time, took away driver development. If we would have said, we're trying to develop cool drivers and do this, you might not have made that decision. So it's more long-term thinking. In 27, we got some more things we're going to look at. You know, I know there's a horsepower discussion. I know we've talked about back in Daytona, qualifying speeds, you know, looking at some things.

You know, looking at some things. That would be fine. Yeah. Just see the cars hauling ass at Daytona. It'd be good, right? Qualifying would be. Versus a guy holding their arm out the window, right? Which we put drivers in that position.

That was on us. But, you know, it's not a great look for the sport. When you look at the Daytona 500 for 27 and you go back to Daytona with the rules package that we ran there, what did you feel like you learned? Did you feel? I mean, I felt like we pushed it a little bit in the right direction. What did you feel like from an industry, the feedback from that race was? Because obviously, going to the Daytona 500, it's a big, that's a big race, big moment for us. So I think I think you're exactly right.

you know, Daytona 500, did we say, wow, that was unbelievable in terms of where we're at, no. But directionally, I thought it was better. I thought that you at least could pull out. There were some more movement where it wasn't just three wide all the way through lockdown. You couldn't move. You know, that's not what we want. So I think there'll be another tweak potentially for Talladega, like directionally to kind of continue that and see how that goes. And hopefully that continues to go in the right direction.

And I think, you know, even looking at, you know, how those races play out. in terms of formats. You know, we want to have those discussions in the future as well. When you look back at the beginning of the next-gen car and so much changed with, you know, COVID coming in and when we launched the car a year later and all the dynamics of the car companies wanting to be electric and hybrid.

And now hybrid is kind of a thing. A full electric car is not really a thing. Where do you think that from the next-gen car itself? like when you watch Bristol, I mean, we all talk about the short track racing. Where do you think that the short track racing is as far as do we need to change something? Do we not need to change something? I think we all think it needs to be better. Bristol was, I mean, we've made Bristol better.

And so that to me is something that that's a hard one though, because we've made the spoiler this tall. We've made the spoiler that tall. What do you think on the short track side of things? Yeah, I think keep looking at it. what can we do around horsepower? What can you do around tires and horsepower in that mix? I think it's something to continue to look at. You know,

I was up at GM this past week talking about, you know, future of engines. And, you know, they all talked about, you know, going back to kind of horsepower V8 NASCAR.

It's crazy how all that's comfortable circle. But it's great because I look at, you know, where we want to go. You're seeing what F1's doing, right? They're chasing that. And we're there.

So to me, it is we got to lean in there. We got to do it in the right way. But I think if everyone knows, is hey, this is the goal. We want to get to X horse power. Here's the tire we need. I think the drivers will certainly be behind that, right? The fans will. That's what they want. And when you go overseas, what's interesting is that's what all the fans want to. That's what they associate NASCAR with. So that's a really big area for us around the engines to continue to attack.

When you go back and you look at, it's just so interesting to me because you've been around this for a long time. And you've seen the fastest cars. You've seen cars get destroyed. destroyed. You've seen the evolution of cars. You've seen Gen 7 car. Race tracks go from this asphalt to that asphalt. What's been the, now that you're sitting in this chair in charge of everything, what's the biggest surprise for you that you've seen that you're like, well, I didn't, I didn't expect to have to do that or didn't see that one coming? I think the two biggest changes I learned along the way. I mean, I've said this many times with you that, you know, you're going to be the most hated guy in the garage when you're in competition.

It was hard for me, right? Because I wanted to be like, hey, one of the guys of respect, but it's tough. You know, you got to make calls and those aren't always liked. But,

you know, making sure that, you know, we have to stick to our guns in terms of the fairness, the inspection process is big to make sure everybody's got a fair playing field. But I would say, I think overall it is the driver aspect of, you know,

everyone's going to want some different things. But at the end of the day, if you guys all get out of the car and say, that's a car I can race and I can go out there and pass versus I can't do anything. There is a big point to that. And sometimes it's noise for a guy maybe in the back, right? Then wants an adjustment. When you have the majority of your guys with a certain package saying, I just can't get by the leader, I mean, that's a red flag. And that's where we have to put drivers who are the best in the world in a position to feel like I got a shot to go do what I can do and showcase my abilities. And at times, I think we've taken that away.

And so that's the direction is make sure that if you're in that race car and you're the best of what you do, you've got a shot to win every week. When you look at the development system from Cup all the way down, what's your overview of where we're at? I know we've moved some ages around. Yeah. We've got ARCA and trucks. And obviously, you know, we've been involved on the Karts Tour side to try to align things across the country to get that system. system back. NASCAR is obviously very involved on the regional local side as well with your short track program. Where do you see all that fitting in? Because we're at a really interesting time with the Gen 7 car, where we're at with trucks in O'Reilly and their vehicles, not really,

they're still training, good training methods, but the cup car's a lot different. Yeah. So where's the overall view of everything from the whole development side, the latter system? Yeah, I think, big opportunity for us to really, I don't want to say take a clean sheet because there's a lot of things that are working well. But, you know, you've brought this up. And I think you're absolutely right on the formats, you know, making sure that if you're a 10 year old racing kind of developing all the way up to Cup, if you have the ability that, if this is a NASCAR race, this is how we race. I think it's vitally important to do that. No matter where you're at, if you're a stock car, if we can kind of all unify on that, I think that would be big and helpful for the new fans coming in. And then I think, you know, looking ahead those five years of if you know kind of where you want to go and you're talking about, you know, what should a stock car in Brazil look like. Yeah.

You know, that could, that could affect maybe what you race in O'Reilly. So, you know, it was up in Canada last week and the guys from Mexico were there because they want to be on the same chassis and the same platform so that if you're scouting a driver coming out of Canada or Mexico and they win, you should at least know, this guy's got some talent. Or I don't know because it's very different cars. So we've got to look at that system all the way through and make sure that we have the right skill set, the right cars. I think still look at the ages. What you guys have done in the car store is awesome. Lean into that from our standpoint, too. And then last piece is where we're racing.

Make sure that we continue to put a driver in a position to get the experience to where when they get to the Cup series right now, it's a problem. You know, we don't have testing. We don't have a lot of things. So we have to figure out how you can. come in and, you know, it doesn't take 300 races that we don't expect you to win right away, but you should be able to go compete. Yeah. When you look at the testing, you guys have opened the testing up for practice on, you know,

on the day before to get of a little more time to the guys. Is there anything out there from the feedback from where the practice time has been for the racetracks and the fans and the drivers and the industry as far as do we need more? Do they want on track more? It varies. I think the tracks would say, you know, hell yeah, the more content, the better. But I think there's some things we want to mix and match that, you know, can we do some things even around qualifying, right,

where we had the pick crews involved, make it a little longer, fans love that. What other events can we have at the track that people want to be part of? So we'll look at, you know, all of that in totality. I think testing has to be in the mix in some capacity. But it's funny you go to even some of the teams, and you'll have one owner, you know, who will text you.

you and say, hey, you know, I don't believe what my other guy said. Yeah, more testing, right? And so it's a bit of a challenge, but I think if we can show people, this is why we're doing it. And if we are able to develop your driver a little more quickly, that's good for the sport. You talk about the racetracks. And every year we go through the schedule and we talk about where we're going, what we're doing.

And I thought the way that you guys released it this year was pretty cool until instead of waiting for the whole complete schedule and just waiting and waiting. waiting and it gets all leaked out. You guys leaked them. One, two, three, four at a time, not leaked, but announced. One, two, three, four races at a time. Where do you see the evolution of the number of races? Because I heard Ben talk the other night about the NFL and the number of races, and I've heard you talk about it as well. Like, what is the, we're in a different era than we were 20 years ago. What's the long-term idea, thought process as to what's the right, number of races. Do we want to race outside of the country, outside of Canada or Mexico,

outside of North America? What's the overall thought process on markets we need to be? Just kind of give us an overlook of the schedule theory and where we need to be from a sports standpoint. Yeah. I mean, it's a great question, one that we're looking across all of our broadcast partners and industry. And I think it all comes, first of all, to demand. If the fans are going to go out there and support 50 races, well, hell, let's look at a schedule that would be. do that. Could you do midweek races? Could you do more short tracks? A lot of that. But we got to make sure that we get the sport right so that demands there for first and foremost. But the biggest thing that I think we all look at is there are iconic NASCAR tracks that you want to win. And we got to

get ahead of that and say, this is going to be here. Our job is to improve this facility because drivers want to win their, teams want to win there, fans want to go there, but we've got to make it a great experience for them. So we're going to ensure that those things have been built throughout are going to remain? And then are there some major markets that we can go and maybe surprise some people, do a military base, you know, here and there. I think the mix of tracks is pretty good right now. We feel like we've got that, that balance. And then when you look ahead international, I wouldn't say immediately, but there is an idea of, you know, could you take one race, maybe an exhibition, just see how it goes, because there's a big demand when you go outside of it. But we don't want

to just take a race. And I've said this. We made that mistake in the thing. We went to Japan. It was cool, but we didn't develop Japanese drivers, OEMs, sponsors. So let's do it right. If we're going to go, let's make sure that it works for your business. If you're a car owner, it works for the drivers. And people understand that when we show up, oh, this is NASCAR, this isn't, you know, what am I watching here? We have work to do on that.

I like the stadium series idea. We take what we did in the Coliseum. Yeah, you could go to, I mean, you could go all around the world. So, you know, if you look at some of the military bases, you know, Ben's working on that too. That's one of the ideas of we know how to do that now. And, you know, I'd love long-term. Who knows if this is possible.

You've got all these new facilities being built. Can we partner with a college football stadium or something? Just put the asphalt underneath, you know, and we'll roll in every couple of years and put on a race. But, you know, who knows is what we can do. Is there any other, as you've gone through the years, how much time have you guys spent with like an F-1 going to races or going to different events around the world.

Do you guys spend a lot of time engaging with other people, or do you just show up and just kind of take in the event? It's a great question. Both, you know, the challenges, right, NASCAR, you grew up in the sport. Sometimes it's if you're not at the race, like, where is this guy? Is he out there? He doesn't care. But I've tried to, you know, get to one or two F1 races,

get to an indie car event. You've got to see what people are doing and learn. And there's some things that we do really well that I wouldn't touch. fan experience is great. The access to the drivers is great. We don't want to be exclusive. We don't want to be that in that lane. But there are other things they do post-race, I think is fantastic at F1 with just the podium, the driver sitting in a room having to talk. The commentators are quiet. You hear that. That's pretty cool. So learning from those, Indy, I think is great, partnering with them a little bit at some other races. I think we'll be

big with Fox. So there's a lot of opportunities. To me, you know, Rickendrick goes, you know, the rising tides. I'd love to see more events where it's indie NHRA, NASCAR, World Outlaws, you know, you go to some festival of speed, right, at some event, and have your young guys there too, and guys can see them. When you were coming up through this sport, you've been through pretty much every level of it. In today's environment, who's your go-to guy? Like, when you're like, oh, man, this is a, this is a scenario I need advice from. You have the crap still hits the fan yeah i'll give you a guess who you think i would still go i mean i'd call mike that's so mike's if i'm sitting here it's you know right down the hall yeah and a good thing about mike you know he's

not coming in saying i wouldn't have done that or wouldn't have done this he'll text you everyone but there's never been a time in my career i couldn't go into his office and say yeah what do you think and he's probably been through it times 10 right and it's it's been very helpful and and i love that about the guy and i mean you've you've grown up with him kevin and And a lot of things that people don't understand about him, right, is it makes a lot of phone calls that nobody sees, just checking in and talking to people. And I'd say that's the biggest lesson I've learned and trying to be better at is pick up the phone, no agenda, what's going on out there. And you learn a lot to be able to make calls. Still get a call every Christmas.

That's, there you go. I mean, every single Christmas, you get to either get a conversation with Mike Hilton or you get a phone call, you know, from Mike. And I think that have you ever walked into his office and him not know the answer to something? Because I don't know that I've ever had a Mike Helton conversation that he doesn't have some sort of diplomatic answer to. The one thing I've learned about Mike, that's true. And he's calmed down a little bit. But the mic, when I was coming up younger, if you didn't know or needed a minute sometimes, you just yelled at. You just get bullied to the point where you're like, uh-oh.

And you go away. And I realize like, oh, he's just getting a minute. It's going to come back to you, which was good. Yeah, he's, he's, you know, I, I tell people all the time, there's, there's not, if it wasn't for Mike Helton and Jim Hunter, yeah, Jim was, Jim was huge. I'd have been in big trouble. Same. And Jim's a guy, too.

If I look back, you know, he's a guy I could go to also. And, you know, I remember one conversation that was an employee working with me who kind of went straight to Mike on something. And I was ticked off. And Jim said, do you think you're going to do your job any better? Because this guy went and talked to Mike. And I was like, no, he's like, why do you give a shit? You know, it was like, all right. That's, you know, and just teaches you those.

lessons and I think we've had good people who who still kept that old school part of NASCAR but I think with Mike and I think if Jim was still around same thing we're able to modernize and think about you know how can we stay true to to who we are but but keep growing the sport yeah well it's it's really interesting to to see the evolution of just kind of where our sport has gone from really trying to be I felt like we wanted to be like the NFL for a long times. Yep. We did. No, we chase, we chase too much. Yeah. And I think we all did. Yeah. Because it's like, we got so big for a period of time to where it was like crowds were massive. You could, you were basically saying, well, I want that sponsor. You were picking your sponsor to,

to decide what you wanted to be on the car. And, and the only thing left to really reach out and grab was, okay, we want to be, we want to be what the NFL is. And I think that the interesting part for me, in going through that process as we all kind of chase that was how unique our fan is. And they really love the blue collar people that are in the sport working on the cars. And I feel like from a management standpoint, that's kind of where NASCAR has gotten back to with not only you as CEO, but also you look at the Hell Yeah, campaign. And you look at the swear jar. and you're not apologizing for it anymore. You're really just like, hey, if you like us, you like us.

If you don't, go find something else. Because if you don't like us, you don't like very many people and you're abnormal. Because there's a lot of really normal people in that racing garage. I think we're going to use that in our next ad campaign. But I think you're exactly right. We steered away from who we truly are. And when you move around, I was in New York last week, I love New York, but I'm not like the CEO who's usually on those shows.

I'd rather not go. go at all. So, but so I'm doing those shows, but what was cool is, you know, they're talking about the momentum and they were talking about just how cool the sport is because of what we're doing now. And so I think if we're just true to who we are, people see that. Yeah. People want to go to a Talladega and experience it and have some fun. And the biggest thing I think that's coming back is and you were great at this, Kevin. You were passionate and everyone saw it. So if I'm going to tune in for a race, I got to have a reason why I got to know you care, right? Or I got to dislike you so much, but I'm so passionate about the sport that you dislike someone too, right?

And that's when we're clicking. When you got a bunch of guys that people either love or don't like, and we're starting to get that in terms of some momentum. So how much say are you going to have in this Days of Thunder script? You know, that's a really good quote. Tim Clark's been on that. I don't know. I do know.

I'm so intrigued by it. I can't hardly take it. I'll tell you what was great. And I'm not saying this because it was like, oh, I got to talk to Tom Cruise. But when he was in Daytona, right, he came up and held court. for five minutes, didn't stop on, I'm going to showcase this sport true to who it is. You're going to have people who've never watched it before. You better be ready.

And I'm going to blow this thing out. And it was, I think we all left. Lisa said, hey, that's our new CEO. I was like, yeah, I agree. So I think there's an opportunity there with them to get it right. But we got to make sure we tell that story, right? And, you know, his point was we got to be ready for it. Yeah.

Well, it's pretty fun to see it come back around to the second one. Last question. And when you look at, I know that there was so much work, concern, questions, committees, so many, so much went into developing this new chase format. And I look at it after three weeks and I couldn't have been more wrong as far as where, how far back you can come from, Joey Lagano's 16 points out. Kyle Arson's leading. Blaney's 52 back and just crashed.

And so winning means so much. Where do you guys think that everything is after the first three weeks with everything that's gone on with the chase so far? Yeah. So I'd go back and first say thank you to the industry, right? Because a lot of time was spent on that. There's a lot. And a lot of good voices to get us where we are. So I thought the quote unquote regular season, I really liked it. The storylines were around drivers winning and around, you know, stars and making some moves, which felt right, not about kind of who finished 18th. And then the first three races have been fantastic. We're talking about. every point matters. We're talking about every race matters. I didn't realize Kevin, I mean, shame on me, but even two years ago when Danny would say, you know, I can take this week off because I'm already to the next round. Right. We should know that, but the light went on of like, what, what's going on here? You don't have 36 races that truly matter. So we have that. I have no idea what's going to happen. Nobody does. That's a great part. But I think people, if they're talking

about the format making the racing more important, we're winning. If we're just going to talk format and we still got some more if that makes sense i think if it can elevate the racing and elevate quote unquote those last 10 then then we're on to something well we just got to get we got to get that regular season championship trophy back so i actually thought about that i made up a t-shirt for denny i still got to give to them but i i kind of agree with that though i felt like you know we went away from it because but there was there was enough there that i think it works it's a 26 week body of work it's it's big i'm with you i think uh i think we think we bring that back well i can't tell you how refreshing it is to see how transparent you guys have been with not only the media

but the fans you haven't shied away from answering one question that that when i'm not even from me but from everybody else because i'm always watching but the transparency and the the the efficiency of making the changes is always what this sport was all about so um thank you guys for the effort that that you're putting in because it's noticeable and and i think it's it's obviously moving in the needle to get us to where we are, three races into this. Now, we can think host of Armplaining a little bit for that last week, but it's been, it's been great to see the progression of changes and at the rate that they're coming. So good job on that. And thank you for taking the time to come in here and talk to us today. I appreciate it. I appreciate

passion you've always had. The time you take to do this show is huge for our fans. And I will say, we're not always going to get things right, but we're going to move fast, we'll move smartly. Yeah. But I think, you know, we'll listen to the fans and try and keep this momentum going. We appreciate it. Thanks, well. Thank you.