​”Candidly Want to Steal”- Steve O’Donnell Outlines F1 Elements NASCAR Plans to Adopt

In a single weekend, NASCAR can give you a fight on the track, a shouting match on pit road and a falling-out between team owners. By Monday, most of it has shrunk to a few interview clips and a headline. Steve O’Donnell would like that to change, and he’s willing to admit Formula 1 has a few things worth copying.

“What does F1 do really well that I candidly want to steal?” NASCAR’s CEO asked in an interview with Front Office Sports.

His answer wasn’t about the cars. It was about the people running the teams, the rivalries between them, and the moments after a race when drivers get to talk without broadcasters talking over them.

“They’ve done a great job promoting their principals outside of the race car,” O’Donnell said. “We need to do the same thing: create those storylines, create those rivalries.”

NASCAR doesn’t have to invent much to make that happen. Denny Hamlin isn’t only a driver chasing wins. He also co-owns 23XI Racing, so when he clashes with other people in the garage, the fallout can reach well past the next restart. Owners have competing interests. Crew chiefs can end up at the center of a dispute after an expensive call. Drivers are rarely short on opinions. The characters are all there, but the sport hasn’t always made them part of the story for fans who don’t follow the garage closely.

F1 has handled this better. Plenty of fans who couldn’t name every driver on the grid know Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, and Christian Horner, the former Red Bull Racing boss, became a central figure in some of the sport’s most public fights. Those clashes gave fans something to follow alongside the drivers’ championship. Even when the front of the field was dull, the rivalry between teams could keep people talking.

NASCAR has its own version. Hamlin’s public spats with Spire Motorsports owner Jeff Dickerson aren’t just two people trading insults. Hamlin is also speaking as someone with a stake in the business side of the sport. O’Donnell has said before that if Hamlin wants to criticize another owner, he should be ready to talk about it in public. That’s a rivalry story, but it’s also a story about who holds power in NASCAR and what they want from it.

O’Donnell thinks the sport should stop leaving that kind of tension on the sidelines. He isn’t talking about staging arguments for TV. He’s talking about letting real disagreements play out, so fans understand what’s at stake instead of watching one sharp comment vanish into the news cycle.

His second idea is gentler, but it might tell you just as much. O’Donnell singled out F1’s post-race cool-down room, where the top three finishers usually sit together before the podium ceremony. The broadcasters stay quiet, and viewers just hear the drivers talk through what they’ve been through.

“They do a great job post-race when, you know, you have three drivers sitting in a room. The broadcasters are silent, and you just hear those drivers talk about what just happened,” O’Donnell said. “It’s a pretty cool moment of how they do it. So some of those things we can tweak.”

NASCAR already interviews drivers after races, but asking each of them the same questions isn’t the same as letting them talk to one another. Picture three drivers going over a late restart or a move that decided the finish.

One defends it, another sees it differently, and a third points out something viewers missed. That kind of unscripted back-and-forth can keep a race interesting after the cars have stopped. O’Donnell isn’t saying NASCAR should turn into F1, though. He was clear about what he wants to protect.

“I will put our racing up against anybody in the world,” he said, pointing to the beating and banging and the lower level of technology in the racing itself. He also talked about the pull of an “analog experience” in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence and digital tech. To him, the noise, the horsepower and the physical nature of stock-car racing are strengths, not rough edges to sand down.

The hard part is getting more people to feel those strengths in the first place. O’Donnell wants a middle-school student in Seattle to become a NASCAR fan without a parent who works in racing or a childhood spent around the sport. He sees a place for NASCAR in music and sneaker culture, too. The aim is to reach people who would never go looking for a race.

NASCAR has already tried. Its “Hell Yeah” campaign put the noise and emotion of racing front and center, and its partnership with the Rolling Stones tied the sport to music through merchandise, content and a fan experience. Moves like these can introduce NASCAR to new people, but they can’t guarantee that someone who sees a campaign will tune in the next Sunday.

O’Donnell believes that getting people to a race can win them over. After that first visit, though, something has to keep them coming back. It could be a driver’s personality, a feud between team leaders, or a post-race conversation that shows what happened beyond the broadcast.

That’s what makes his F1 comparison worth taking seriously. NASCAR doesn’t need another series’ identity. It needs to make better use of its own. The arguments are already happening, and the drivers already have plenty to say. O’Donnell just wants more fans listening, and he doesn’t want anyone in the garage to turn the volume down.

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