I went to Sonoma for a NASCAR race and found out heat is the bad guy, fluids are the secret weapon, and Valvoline's engineers are basically mad scientists with pit passes. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. A tire is making decent progress coming out of a turn at Sonoma Raceway --except for the fact it's no longer attached to Cody Ware's No. 51 Ford Mustang. Crowds gasp, cars swerve, and the wheel menacingly rolls off, then on, and then off the track again before it finally collapses. I've never related to a tire more.

It was the first time an electric vehicle led the field at NASCAR's most famous race. Chevrolet made history at the 67th Daytona 500 by introducing the 2025 Blazer EV SS as the official pace car. This marked the first time an electric vehicle led the field at NASCAR's most iconic race, a striking symbol of how the automotive world is shifting toward electrification while still honoring its racing heritage. The Blazer EV SS isn't just any electric SUV; it's the quickest SS model Chevrolet has ever built, and it turned heads both on and off the track. JOIN THE FREE "CYBERGUY REPORT": GET MY EXPERT TECH TIPS, CRITICAL SECURITY ALERTS AND EXCLUSIVE DEALS, PLUS INSTANT ACCESS TO MY FREE "ULTIMATE SCAM SURVIVAL GUIDE" WHEN YOU SIGN UP!

And what does the future hold for eNASCAR and the sport's overall sim racing ambitions? Officials like Clark and Myers suggest that a host of options are on the table: increased prize pools, additional TV coverage and more involvement from real-life, professional NASCAR drivers. Parker Kligerman, part owner of eNASCAR team Burton Kligerman eSports and a racing analyst for NBC Sports Network, said he's pushing his drivers to be more visible, streaming more frequently and creating digital content. "We have the opportunity to do things real-world racing can't," Kligerman said. "I continue to believe that there's huge potential here, and we've only just hit the tip of the iceberg."

More than 195 drivers have won a Cup Series race since NASCAR started in 1948, but who has won the most? Kyle Larson can return to NASCAR competition next season following a long suspension for using a racial slur while playing a video game. He was suspended in April for after he used the n-word while playing an online racing game in which viewers could follow along. He was dropped by his sponsors and fired by Chip Ganassi Racing. Larson, who is half-Japanese, spent the last six months immersed in diversity programs that helped him gain an understanding of racial injustice.

Today, the technological landscape is expanding by all leaps and bounds, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) remains in the thick of it. A technology that is one for the present and future, AI is playing a massive role in shaping businesses to the core. From healthcare and entertainment to commerce and sports, Artificial Intelligence is transforming every industrial vertical for good. Here is how artificial intelligence will change the world of sports. Speaking of the sports industry itself, the presence of AI today is to be seen in just about every major league around the world.

NASCAR will use the breadth and depth of AWS technologies to build cloud-based services and automate processes, including a new video series on NASCAR.com The video series will debut heading into the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Michigan International Speedway, sharing the greatest historical moments in NASCAR racing with viewers. NASCAR is migrating its 18-petabyte video archive to AWS, and will leverage Amazon Rekognition--an AWS service that adds intelligent image and video analysis to applications--to automatically tag specific video frames with metadata, such as driver, car, race, lap, time, and sponsors so they can easily search those tags to surface the most iconic moments from past races. By using AWS's services, NASCAR expects to save thousands of hours of manual search time each year, and will be able to easily surface flashbacks like Dale Earnhardt Sr.'s 1987 "Pass in the Grass" or Denny Hamlin's 2016 Daytona 500 photo finish, and quickly deliver these to fans via video clips on NASCAR.com and social media channels. NASCAR will leverage AWS services to enhance its full range of media assets including websites, mobile applications, and social properties for its 80 million fans worldwide.

Florida farmer Gary Wishnatzki was convinced that automation would be a game-changer and so he joined a team of engineers to try and create a robot that could mimic what a picker in the field does. Florida and Texas are the two states expected to suffer the greatest economic damage from climate change, according to a new study from Science magazine. Researchers calculated that Florida will lose $100.9 billion from GDP due to climate change, while Texas will lose $100.7 billion. By the mid-2000s, NASCAR had evolved from modest origins -- car races on the sands of Daytona Beach more than 60 years ago -- to become a multibillion-dollar industry. But 2006 marked a turning point.

Anti-drone technology isn't just being used at airports or sensitive political and military locations. Law enforcement just relied on DroneShield's systems, including its anti-drone gun, to protect against UAVs during a NASCAR race series at the Texas Motor Speedway between April 5th and April 8th. The tech helped police watch out for drones, disable them and (if all else failed) knock them out of the air. There weren't any known incidents, but it's notable that the technology was involved in the first place -- it was the first time American law enforcers used all three of DroneShield's products. The company is also keen to tout that it's the "sole provider" of counter-drone hardware for NASCAR.

NASCAR, like a number of other corporations keen on attracting a younger audience, thinks e-sports could be a successful tactic. Two different bodies within the stock car racing association are separately developing e-sports championships that aim to commence this year, one of them perhaps in time for the season-opening Daytona 500 on February 18. In early January, Sports Business Daily reported that Blake Davidson, the sanctioning body's VP of licensing and consumer products, was working on an e-sports championship that would take place at tracks during race weekends. Tournament players could choose to play in either NASCAR Heat 2, a more casual, entry-level racing game for the Xbox and Playstation, or opt for the deep-end seriousness of iRacing. Overhauled tracks like Las Vegas Motor Speedway might use their own screening areas to host virtual racing events, but it's more likely that specially equipped trucks would travel between tracks.

It all goes wrong at 90 mph. Mid-turn, a slight bump from another car sends Parker Kligerman, professional Nascar racing and motorsports analyst, straight into the wall. "I just dumped Parker, LMAO!" the dumper in question crows. We're at Volusia Raceway, a dirt track I'm pretty sure is in Tennessee and Kligerman thinks is in Alabama. It's actually in Florida, and the two of us are really in Kligerman's Connecticut bedroom, where he's showing me what a pro can do in a round of iRacing.